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

by Unknown

  “You are not entirely cleansed of deepsleep narcosis,” Ship said, “but you are rational and your body is highly operable, though it needs exercise, as do the bodies of the other crew members.”

  “Please find if they are well and sober,” I said. “Doctor, Navigator, Seeker—how do they fare?”

  “They fare well . . . No. Disregard. Farewell is a phrase suitable for departures. The crew fare good. They are beginning to awake.”

  “I will address them when all is sober.”

  “The correct would be, when all are sober,” said Ship.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Eighty-four point oh-two certain.”

  “Our mission dialect is difficult,” I said.

  “The English is,” Ship said. “There are other planetary languages more difficult; there are others less so. Part of the problem is that we have taken our knowledge of these languages from what remained of the libraries of relic spaceships. The electronics were primitive and much has been lost to age-deterioration and other damage.”

  “But we must persevere,” I replied, “for if our mission performance is well, we must be ready to converse.”

  “All the crew have been instructed during normal sleep periods and also during deepsleep, but that is not the same as speaking. We all must practice.”

  “I will write my account in English,” I said. “That will be strong practice.”

  “We salute your pluck,” Ship said, speaking for the Alliance, I presumed.

  While Ship was waking the rest of the crew, I undertook the prescribed medicines and waters and endured the exercises. During the stretches and lunges, I reviewed the tasks that awaited. The Starheads had taken over the planet third from the sun to use as a base for offensive strikes and architectural experiment. As usual, they had almost eradicated the dominant intelligent species and there remained only scattered Remnants that were like my siblings and me. Our own home had been destroyed and the four members left of my family had been rescued by a small party of scientists who were members of the Radiance Alliance, the ancient foes of the Starheads. The Alliance are a highly advanced race (in our local mission world they were called the Great Ones) and they have thought it desirable to try to preserve all the different species of life that they could rescue. The Starheads (locally known as the Old Ones) regard every other species of intelligent beings but themselves as enemies, active or potential. For this reason, they kill all. But if any can be saved from slaughter, the Great Ones strive to that end and send out disguised spying machines where the Starheads are active to find if some few survivors escaped their attentions. Traces of Remnants had been detected here and Ship and crew had been dispatched.

  So here we were. Our task was to find and rescue as many fugitives from the Old Ones as possible.

  It was no easy job, and to accomplish it, we had only the four of us and Ship. We were not in direct contact with the Alliance for fear that the Starheads might trace signals back to our base and thereupon wreak destruction.

  I desisted from my exercises and greeted my ship-mates as they left their cubes and entered the control room one by one.

  First there came my younger brother, whom Ship had designated navigator and now we used this title instead of his actual name. It is best to call him Navigator in this narrative in case information might be gleaned from his own name. Though he is younger than I, he is more muscled and usually bests me in the pan-agon arena where we exercise martially. Still, I have been designated Captain and he must receive my orders, which he does mostly patiently and sometimes not. His duty is to cooperate with Ship to keep knowledgeable of our spatial locations, of the happenstances in our space environment, and to locate and trace the movements upon the planetary surface of any Remnants we might contact.

  My sister, who is only slightly younger than me, Ship names Doctor because it is her duty to tend the health of us three others. She monitors not only illness but also signs of emotional disturbance and of sudden, untoward changes in our mental states. She must keep watch that the thoughtprobes of Starheads do not disrupt our minds or displace them completely to make us to be crawlers and droolers, bereft of rationality, trying to do away with ourselves and with one another. She is always glancing at graph-screens and listening to corporal rhythms that Ship relays to her about our bodilies.

  My youngest sister we call Seeker, a name not so pretty by far as her own true name. I should not write so here, perhaps, but she is my favorite person in the cosmos and also she is the favorite of all the crew. Whereas Navigator and Doctor are largish of corpus and darkly haired and complected, Seeker is as white as a gleaming mineral and her skin seems to glow, almost. Her eyes are green but become violet-like of color when she makes mind contact with others. Her hair is silver silk. All female telepaths belong to this physical type, Ship says, or at least the hominids do, though I believe none others universally can be so pretty as Seeker.

  Her duty is the most demanding, for she must make mind contact with a Remnant group and persuade it to come to a place within the planet where we can guide them and let them know we are not perilous and mean them no injury and that we are all trying to escape and hide from the Old Ones now and maybe in time to come grow strong and do them grievous hurt so that the cosmos will not be only Starheads and their slaves and nothing else that thinks and feels.

  Here now they stood before me, the three, still a little wrinkled in spirit from deepsleep and slightly confused. But they answered cheeringly when I spoke to each and congratulated on wakefulness. “Do we all know what is to come?” I asked.

  They said Yes.

  Then Ship directed us to the small mess hall and we partook solid food instead of veinous alongside some happy water and were much refreshed.

  Then we returned to control and set up our routines.

  Millions and millions of light years we had traveled, Ship had informed Navigator. Our vessel, disguised as a comparatively leisurely meteor, had skated across the orbit of the fourth planet and soon would pass the single moon of the third planet.

  Navigator suggested that we call this third planet Terra, a word from an ancient and long deceased speech known as Latin. “We cannot very well call it Earth,” he said. “All home planets are earths. Confusion must ensue.”

  “Terra is sound,” I said. “Soon we shall be in its farther gravitation and perhaps Seeker can begin to search for whispers or traces of hominid Remnant mentation.”

  “I shall begin when our approach is closer,” she said.

  “It would require powerful amplification of telepathic signal to scan the surface from here. Amplification of such magnitude the Starheads would notice.”

  “Now that we are in the Terran sun-system, let us call them Old Ones,” I said. “We do not wish to confuse the Remnant group when we make contact.”

  “Very well, Captain,” she said. She wore a pretty smile when she said that. I thought how it was or seemed un-right that she, the smallest and most delicate of the crew, must perform the most difficult duties and engage the greatest risks. After all the millions of light years we had traversed through underspace, Seeker must calibrate her last tasks in terms of English yards, feet, inches and fractions of inches. It is a little like, I thought, leaping from an immensely tall tower and coming to rest lightly upon a grain of sand. While she was doing so, distractions would be taking place violently.

  If any of us others could have done it for her, we would so, but we lacked the telepathic talents that are hers. We each possessed rudimentary telepathic ability, as Ship says that almost every intelligence must own, and Ship is able to link us tenuously with Seeker when necessary, but each faint contact is not voluptuously profitable. None could take Seeker’s place, but we would be aiding in all possible ways, and eagerly too.

  I read through the long list of protocols and drills that Ship inscribed on my screens and during the next eight waking periods, I went through them with the crew until it would no longer help to do so.

&
nbsp; Thereafter we rested and played games among us, though Seeker and Ship kept alert.

  Then on the next watch, Seeker reported that she detected mental activity nothing like that of the Old Ones. It was a small group hiding away, she said, three or four of them. Of three she was certain, but the fourth was unclear. One of the three was a telepath, sending strange, nearly random signaling, though of course not directed at Seeker. “This telepath is un-normal of mind,” she said. She wrinkled her brow as she bent to her screens and scopes and auditories. Her console and all its instruments were nervily active, blinking and trilling, and her hands fluttered over them like white ribbons wafting in strong air convection.

  “Is the Terran telepath deranged?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” Seeker said, and Doctor said, “Not exactly deranged.” She was busy at her instruments also. Her console was collecting medical information from Seeker’s instruments and filtering for Doctor.

  “What then?” I asked.

  She hesitated then said, “I believe the Terran term is autistic.”

  “Autistic?” I said.

  She paused again, listening, and then repeated what Ship told her screen: “Autistic defines a mental condition or disposition lacking ability to generalize and to form conclusions aiding useful or even necessary actions. It is marked by a profound, imprisoning subjectivity. Many autistic individuals possess rudimentary telepathic capacities; some of them are well advanced in the talent.”

  “Profound, imprisoning subjectivity sounds like derangement,” I said. “Is this autist able to travel distances?”

  She studied for a while and then replied. “I think so, yes. But it will be difficult for her.”

  “The telepath is female?”

  “Yes, a she.”

  “Being autistic, does she know she is telepathic?” I asked Seeker.

  She studied. “We are too far. I cannot read. She may be mind-linked to a slave organism.”

  “That does not bode good,” I said.

  “We need to be nearer.” Her face wrinkled as she concentrated and I recalled her description of the difficulties of receiving such mental fields or auras and the messaging therein. “It is like trying to feel a photon with a fingertip,” she said. We marveled at that notion, Doctor and I. Navigator only shook his head impatiently. I think that he is sometimes a little envious of Seeker’s abilities. It is good he keeps good temper, for if we quarreled and made spats, our concentration would suffer harm.

  In the ruins of the old spaceship libraries there were many descriptions of Terra’s moon. The scientific accounts put its orbital revolution at 271/3 days at a distance of 384,403 kilometers from the planet. Its bright albedo was remarked and attributed to its surface of glassy crystalline soil. There was a great amount of similar minutiae, important to Terrans because a moon base was in process of construction when the Old Ones came again. This satellite inspired poets to write of it incessantly, often in terms not faithful to astronomical fact. They frequently spoke of it in terms of silver, as “striding the night in silver shoon” or “gifting its silver smile to the still waters.”

  If there were any poets upon the planet still composing, they spoke no more of a “silver orb.” The Old Ones had sculpted the satellite into a five-pointed construction, angry red-orange in color, mottled with pyramidal protrusions disposed in groups of five, a geometry vaguely suggesting the shapes of the crania of the Old Ones. The rubble from this immense project was still falling upon Terra in shower after shower of meteors and meteorites. This was one reason Ship was cloaked in the guise of a meteor. So many of such bodies were striking Terran atmosphere, it had been thought that we might be undistinguished amid the number of them.

  On such frail hopes and forlorn details our enterprise depended.

  I could not always keep my apprehensions at bay. The four of us, with no useful experience to rely on, dropping through its sun-system to an obscure planet, no more than a speck on the outer shoals of this galaxy, our vessel disguised and ridged and pocked as if by collisions, a mote thousands of times smaller than the watery world toward which we drifted . . . What madness had come upon the Great Ones to entrust us with so important a mission?

  Then it came to me that our ignorance and inexperience were the factors that had determined the choice. We were a more expendable crew than most of the other search teams. Those who had survived encounters and rescued Remnant groups would be sent to more prominent fronts to undertake larger and more urgent missions. Our little family was dispatched to an odd little corner of the conflict. If the Old Ones exterminated us, the loss would be relatively unimportant—unless we let slip, through carelessness or under stress, information that might help tease out the locations of important Alliance posts.

  Dreadful but necessary measures had been installed to prevent that from happening.

  We kept gazing at the ugly orange moon-sculpture as it filled twelve of our visiscreens. I thought that it seemed to pulse its coloration, the orange brightening and darkening at irregular intervals, but set the impression aside as an illusions born of tensed nerves.

  “Navigator,” I said, “how fare we?”

  He glanced at his instruments and sighed. “Well enough, I think, though there are some slight anomalies I cannot account for. Distances seem to change irrespective of our velocity.”

  “Seeker?”

  “I think the Starheads—I mean, the Old Ones—may be distressing the local space-weave,” she said. “They are probably constructing some of those colossal engines we were taught about. The energies exchanged are so enormous they may twist space-time here.”

  Navigator said this might account for his observations.

  Then Seeker asked us to fall quiet. “I may be feeling something,” she said. “Silence will help me to concentrate. I am picking up fearful emotions. At least, I think perhaps.”

  “The crew will silence,” I said.

  Seeker had spoken before of the fear the fugitives on Terra must be enduring and I understood that these would be stark and continuous, but I wondered how they would feel if they knew the extent of the Old Ones’ desecrations. World on world, across all the cosmos, were crumbled to rubble or blown away to radioactive cloud, millions of nations, tribes, and civilizations were mangled to bloody ruin, the grandest achievements of art, science, religion, and philosophy had gone dark like lights turned off on a space cruiser.

  The Terrans had known something of the Old Ones before this time. They had learned, but they had forgotten—almost purposefully, it seemed. In one of the relic spaceship libraries was a long document concerning something called Miskatonic Expedition 1935. This exploration project had discovered in land- mass Australia “certain traces” the Old Ones had left “in rocks even then laid down a thousand million years . . . laid down before the true life of [Terra] had existed at all.” The Terrans, according to this history, knew about the struggles of the Old Ones against the “spawn” of Cthulhu and the abominable Mi-Go and about some of the interstellar subjugations and massacres. These things they knew, but when the ancient evils rose again from the sea or “seeped down” from the stars, they were not prepared.

  Their lack of realization had been pointedly described by their best historian of Cthulhu and the Old Ones and Great Ones. He spoke candidly of their failure, imputing it to “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” He drew a dark, disheartening view of his species: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in a black sea of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

  They had not voyaged far, but black infinity had come upon them, and few were left and those scattered few must endure miserable, terror- filled days and nights. These Terrans probably would not be counted among the greatest of races in the cosmos; they were not the widest thinkers or most accomplished builders or the most generous of spirit. Yet they had achieved things fine in their way, however modest. Their erasure would be a waste, pathetic if not tragic. They had struggled again
st the Old Ones, this planet full of nations. Now we four individuals must struggle against the same implacable force.

  I ordered myself not to allow this mood of thought to dominate my spirit.

  After the next sleep period, Seeker told us that she had located geographically the Terran telepath and her group. It was a family of four, including the mysterious ancillary member whose thoughts Seeker could partially read but only sometimes. “She too is a female, this other one, and, like the telepath, she has extremely limited language skills, so that it is difficult to understand her thought patterns. She mostly thinks without words and possesses sensory organs different from those of her companions. She may belong to a different species.”

  “Yet you say she is not enslaved,” I said.

  “It is an arrangement we do not have ourselves,” she said.

  “Does she see herself as part of the group?”

  “Yes. But I need more information.”

  “We will now orbit-out three locator flyers,” I said. “They will triangulate the source-point of the telepathic signals, just as we rehearsed.”

  Ship gave a slight lurch, having dispatched the flyers as I was speaking. Each flyer contained amplifiers to reinforce the signals from Terra. They transmitted simultaneously pictures of the planetscape to the ship screens and to Seeker’s mind. If all performed according to scheme, we would have pictures of the close environs of the Remnant family in eight hours or fewer.

  But it was a tiring interlude for Seeker. I watched her at work, her neck and shoulders tense in concentration. I could see the muscles strain as she bent to her console. Her lightweight white robe emphasized her taut slenderness and she frowned and smiled alternately, as the signal strengthened or faded. I could almost read Seeker’s mind as she seined through the blasts of data she intook, making innumerable decisions almost instantaneously.

  Doctor too was concentrating. Her mechanisms were now principally focused upon Seeker, monitoring her physical conditions to the finest detail. If something touched Seeker’s mind, the event would show on Doctor’s screens and she would decide whether Ship must go dark, maybe forever.