The stars were right. The time was right. It was not like tumblers in a lock. Wrong metaphor. More like the completion of a circuit.
That which wore Adam Robinson’s body turned in its chair and raised a hand. A curtain drew back, revealing an immense circular glass window that that looked out, not on the surface of the Black Planet, but into the depths of space. The star field, like smoke in a wind, rippled. Gaps were appearing in it. Gates were opening.
It was Pasternak, who was mad, who now ran down the length of the length of the table, not to assault anyone, but to leap headlong through that window. The glass shattered. The air roared out of the room, taking with it stray bits of paper, the water bottles, and even a portrait of the original Delaroche Brothers off the wall.
Robinson tried to speak, but his lungs ruptured. A cloud of half-frozen blood spewed out of his mouth. Somehow, he was still conscious. That which possessed his body now didn’t need lungs. He couldn’t think clearly. His mind was not his own. Other thoughts, other memories, other visions overwhelmed him. He wondered if it meant anything that the first and last human beings in existence were named Adam. Probably not. He tried to form something with the lips, what had been his lips but were now only borrowed as the dominant entity within the body was momentarily startled by the breaking glass. He tried, maybe he succeeded in forming the words fuck you one last time, one last shout of nihilistic defiance addressed to the whole universe. Maybe no one heard it, but, he was certain, that was the best epitaph mankind was going to get.
Darrell Schweitzer has been publishing short fiction since the early 1970s. This present story is, by his count, #334. In the past ten years or so, his work has taken a decidedly Lovecraftian turn, which is fully displayed in his most recent collection, Awaiting Strange Gods (Fedogan & Bremer, 2015). His other collections include The Emperor of the Ancient Word, Transients, The Great World and the Small, Nightscapes, Necromancies and Netherworlds (with Jason Van Hollander), Refugees from an Imaginary Country, and Tom O’bedlam’s Night Out. His 2008 novella, Living with the Dead, was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist. He has been four times nominated for the World Fantasy Award and won it once, in 1991, as co-editor of Weird Tales, a position he held for nineteen years. He has edited the anthologies Cthulhu’s Reign (2010) and That Is Not Dead (2015). He is the author of three novels, The Mask of the Sorcerer, The Shattered Goddess, and The White Isle, plus books on H.P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, and the classic The Innsmouth Tabernacle Choir Hymnal, which is used when he leads the choir at Cthulhu prayer breakfasts.
Drift from the Windrows
Mike Allen
Eden, I’m not a writer. Not like you are. You touch a keyboard, and I swear, five thousand words drop out in thirty seconds. Not for me. I type fast, yes, but I will never have so much to say. Not all at once like that.
Truth is, I’m not much of a talker, either. You know that, right? This, what’s happening right now with the words coming from me so easy, that’s got to be the state I’m in. My nerves. The chemicals in the air. All those sounds in the other room.
Maybe it’s easier that I’m just talking to my laptop. I’m glad I can’t see my reflection in the screen. I don’t think I could record this if I could see my own face. Even though it’s for you.
I need you to understand what all that pain means, what it’s for. I hope my words are clear—it’s hard to tell, I can barely hear my own voice.
My boss can probably hear me out here. I don’t think she cares.
Oh gods, I wish I had known how much you hated SanMorta before we started sleeping together. But when I told you where I worked, you didn’t say anything. Why?
Wait, I remember. You told me why you didn’t say anything. Because you wanted me that bad. Because you didn’t want to scare me off. But you know, I don’t think you could have. Your purple hair didn’t scare me. Your tattoos, the gauges stretching your earlobes, your nipple rings, none of that scared me. Fuck, even the thought of what my dad was going to say didn’t scare me. The bastard had a hard enough time accepting me as a scientist. He wanted me married off to a doctor back home. Seven steps of wedding vows around a fire, jewelry through my nose, the whole traditional shebang.
What he said to me when I confessed I loved a woman—I never told you, did I? You asked me, and I told you not to make me speak of it. You were so respectful of my wishes. Is that why you never talked to me about my job? You knew I’d tell you not to write what you planned to write, never ever to do it, and you didn’t want to give me a chance to object? Is that it?
You confuse me so much. But I love that about you. Even now I hope that doesn’t change. I hope you come out of this with some of that wildness left inside.
Brady here at work told me. He showed me your blog. The entry about what SanMorta does to farmers.
I know all about that, you know. I don’t like it either. I don’t even care that they can hear me say it right now. I know why people think it’s unfair: those farmers don’t have much money, and SanMorta has billions. What harm could this company possibly suffer if someone saves a few seeds? But that’s not the point you made, is it? In that blog entry.
Brady told me he found what you wrote because that super-popular activist site linked to it. Spread it everywhere. His eyes were so wide, watching me as I read your blog entry on his screen. Because he thought he was looking at a dead woman. That you and I both were as good as dead.
You’re not the first to claim my employer deliberately tampers with crops and uses aggressive legal tactics to sweep it under the rug. But what you blogged, about why they do it …
You had to know they would come straight to me. That I would have to answer for your words. In all my soul, I can only find the will to forgive you because you couldn’t possibly have imagined the consequences.
If I’m to survive—if we are to survive—I can never, ever, let them lose their faith in me.
Know I came home to you that day with a heavy heart. Please, know that.
Please.
Sorry, I lost my breath. I think I might have fainted.
It smells like asphalt in here. No, so much worse, like there’s a tar pit from prehistoric days in my boss’s office and it exhaled all its ghosts into this waiting room.
There’s a sweet smell inside the tar, like honeysuckle, like you, and it gets stronger every time I hear your voice through that door, but if I try to inhale you, the tar will kill me. One hundred percent tar, just like the old cigarette ads never said. I’ll barf my lungs out, and they’ll grow legs and crawl away …
I’m sorry, Eden. I don’t even remember what I just said. I’m fighting to keep these words sane.
But I remember when I got home and confronted you with that printout. And you just said, “Yeah, I tried to get you fired,” like it was nothing. It would have taken me a thousand hours of screwing up my courage to admit something like that, but you just blurted it out! My dad beat me for blurting things out. Your dad did too, didn’t he? You told me that, and that wasn’t even the worst he did. So how did we grow up to be so different?
Concentrate, Amisha. Keep your focus.
Eden, this is so hard. To fight the drugs we’re breathing. To finally speak my secret aloud.
It’s like I see you in front of me now, me saying, “What were you thinking? I almost lost my job!”
And your blue eyes went steely, and you said, “That would be a good thing. I think they’ve brainwashed you, Amisha.”
And as I sat there in shock, you snuggled against me on the love seat, like you wanted a kiss. And you started talking about the lateral gene transmission, like I didn’t know.
I was too stunned by what you had done to say anything else. I just let you go on.
And much of what you said, I’ve heard before. That, with genetically modified food, the body doesn’t recognize when it’s ingested something unnatural. That the body gets fooled into replicating unwanted genes. I couldn’t help but laugh when your eyes went all wide and seriou
s, and you told me, “They’ve proven that the mutant cells start clustering in our reproductive organs first. So children are born with that modified DNA already a part of them.”
I know I shouldn’t have laughed. It wasn’t for the reasons you thought. I was laughing because you couldn’t possibly have known how close you’d come to describing what’s really going on without actually understanding one fucking bit of it.
And then you yelled at me about how SanMorta gets away with it because they have plants—human plants!—in every level and branch of government, and I know I shouldn’t have kept laughing.
But then you grabbed me and shook me!
How could you do that?! You know all about what my dad did to me when I was eight. I trusted you with that! Did you do it deliberately? To hurt me the way my dad would hurt me, so I’d heel like a good little dog?
You’re the first person I’ve known who I ever felt I could be intimate with. And I’ve even told you … that you make me feel safe …
Sorry, Eden. It doesn’t matter now.
But I keep forgetting what’s important because of the atmosphere in here. It’s so thick with the Mother’s musk, it’s like my brain isn’t even attached to my body anymore.
Is this thing still recording? It is, bless the stars.
I had to show you that you had it all wrong. It’s a miracle I was even allowed to come home to you.
And I admit, it broke my heart in a completely irrational way that you agreed so readily to a tour of our lab. I knew then and there that you had to be plotting something that you’d try to hide from me.
But at the same time, you made me so happy. Because I knew then you had a chance. We had a chance.
Oh! Oh no! Wait … wait, Mother … I’m not finished, don’t … Eden, I love y—
She let me go.
Looks like my laptop is still working. She didn’t touch it.
I don’t think she cares about our lives. I mean, our day-to-day lives. And that’s why I have hope. I hope what she took from me will help you …
I hope they’ll make the things the Mother is doing to you proceed easier.
This stench, it’s so thick. It makes my head light. I don’t know if I’m talking to you or dreaming it all.
Funny that I remember this now: I did worry that you’d be disappointed at how mundane this place is. You know, our labs, they don’t look much different than what you find in the biology department at Ferris University—sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, especially now. I just remembered your shout of “FU” every time I said that name. Fact is, our labs look junkier. Hah. And you know, the “palace of all evil,” as you call it, is just a big greenhouse on the roof. Where we keep all the varieties of plants we’re studying. To see what gene combinations show promise.
It’s really important, what we do. The heirloom seeds you yammer on about—the world is undergoing drastic changes. I have inklings of what’s going to happen, and I still struggle to imagine it. The weather turning haywire won’t account for even a fraction of how this planet will transform. What humans will endure. But we’ll still need to grow food. We have to adapt our crops.
I don’t hear those sounds any more. Maybe it’s over. Or maybe my senses have stopped working.
But my laptop is here on the desk. I can touch its warm screen. The little line that the recording program displays keeps pulsing as I speak.
Did I say something about how the Mother doesn’t care? None of them care. About our daily lives. My co-workers might care, but they’re not the ones that matter. These … creatures only care about the big picture and where we fit in it.
But Eden, you were all about the big picture, too. Of course, you planned to put everything you found on your blog. I knew you had a camera hidden in that purse; you never carry a purse. Did someone from the activist website give that to you?
Fact is, I could read your thoughts like a picture book. If I lost my job because of your exposé, if you wrecked my career, I’d be free of this place, and you could deprogram me. Lovingly. And I’d see that you did it all for love and love you even more.
What I kept thinking about, though, when I led to you to my boss’s office, was how you grabbed me by the neck and shook me. Like my father did because I wouldn’t do what he wanted. So many years, I would sit on his lap, and he would sing to me so beautifully in Hindi, and I would wish I knew the words. I had no warning what was waiting inside him.
Or you. But I do forgive you.
Some part of me, though, must hate the thought of happiness for us. Because there was a perverse part of my mind that desperately wanted you to catch on. The way all my co-workers treated you better than any real science journalist would ever be treated, all smiles and happy to show you everything, even though you’re nothing more than an angry woman with your own little angry blog. The way they just smiled and kept chatting about how we use traditional cross-pollinating when you couldn’t hide your boredom anymore. The way my boss greeted you like an old friend after the things you wrote.
She looked her dapper best, I tell you that. I can’t believe how pretty she can be sometimes. It’s all about her mood, I think. How she wants you to feel.
I could tell you were responding to that aspect of her power, too, Eden. But how could you help yourself? No one can, really. Sometimes, I think my boss is just another human, taken deeper into the Mother’s mystery than all the rest of us. Sometimes, I think she’s a piece of the Mother, an independent aspect.
What I think is irrelevant.
No one can resist her charms. When she selects someone to interview here, you can bet they’ll show up on time. But it’s how they respond to her boss that’s important. Whether they understand and comply, like I did. Or try to fight back. Or start shrieking.
My boss’s boss. The Mother. She was waiting for you in the room beyond the office. They told me I wasn’t allowed to say anything about her. That I had to let her introduce herself.
My boss was weaving her spell of words. You didn’t notice when the Mother started attaching her limbs to you. I did. I couldn’t say anything.
Eden, I’m so sorry.
I was hoping you wouldn’t scream.
I grew up reading comic books about the many-armed Hindu gods. Sometimes when the Mother takes me, I close my eyes and imagine it’s Parvati embracing me. Preparing me for the times ahead. The Mother lets me think this, I think, even sometimes makes it real for me. She wants me to be willing. I don’t know what she does for the others. We don’t dare talk about that. I wouldn’t even speak it aloud now if anyone else was here.
I guess you could say, the same thing you tried to do to me—set up an ambush to force me off the team—I had to do to you. Otherwise, our lives were forfeit.
When I went to the Mother to answer for what you’d done and she took me in her arms, I showed her how useful you could be, filled my mind with visions of all the things you could do for her once she taught you the right way to think. How your voice on our side would make our cause easier. Thank the gods, I saw that she agreed, that you would be spared.
She showed me what she had in mind for you.
I didn’t see any other choice.
The Mother isn’t like you—or like dad. She’s been honest with all of us here about the harm that lies inside her.
Eden, you were absolutely right about some things. You wrote that the reason SanMorta denies that its GMOs cause genetic drift in humans isn’t blind stupidity or bureaucratic incompetence. You said they’re doing it deliberately and that they want it to spread.
This is true.
You almost even grasped the reason why. You wrote that it was for population control, that the group you’re in touch with believes the intruder genes will make everyone more docile, more vulnerable to disease, more dependent on government.
They’ll cause changes all right. I can’t think about it because it makes me feel so sick I want to vomit myself inside out.
The Mother is just one of multitudes.
She and the ancient things she calls kindred are … are kind in their own way. When they make themselves known, they don’t want bloodshed. They want to claim this world peacefully.
The things they can do with their minds. The ways their forms can change. We can’t hurt them. Their bodies—most of what they are doesn’t even exist in this dimension. There is nothing we can do to stop them.
Those of us who are useful, those of us who understand and show that we are with them, we have a chance at lives, at futures. A slim chance but a chance.
Those who resist, who don’t understand, who are not useful. They will just be crops.
There are some, like your father—like my father—who deserve that and worse. But I want you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want you to be with me when this future comes. It’s the only hope I have that it will be bearable.
The smells are fading. Those sounds you were making, they’ve stopped.
The Mother promised me you would still be you when she was done. That you would still look like you. Even, to some degree, still think like you.
Oh, I hope she’s kept her promise.
If there’s something left in you that questions what I’ve done, I’ll play this because I won’t be able to say these things to your face.
But I hope I don’t need it. I hope I can just delete it and never worry about us again.
I love you.
On weekdays, Mike Allen writes the arts column for the daily newspaper in Roanoke, Va. Most of the rest of his time he devotes to writing, editing, and publishing. He’s the editor of Mythic Delirium magazine and the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, and the author of the novel The Black Fire Concerto, as well as the short story collections Unseaming and The Spider Tapestries. He has been a Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and he has won three Rhysling Awards for poetry.
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 26