by Adam Nevill
“This can’t be the Sword AI,” Dr. Campbell said, oblivious to the blue language and blood flowing from the younger boy. “Unless, unless… Astonishing. Your AI operates on the micro and multiple scales. Does this fragment possess sentience as well?”
“Why am I always the one to get tortured?” Dred said. “I’m younger and more malleable. You should be torturing Mac to manipulate me!”
“I read your file,” Labrador said. “You have the empathy of a turnip.” He gestured to Whalen. Whalen flicked blood from his knife and leaned forward.
“All right,” Mac said. He made a wooden mask of his face. “Don’t hurt him. I’ll cooperate. Black, resume active function.”
The diamond hummed briefly. Hello, Macbeth Tooms. Hello, Drederick Tooms. Hello, Mr. Labrador. Hello, Dr. Campbell. Hello, Mr. Whalen. Hello, Tom. Black hesitated. Macbeth Tooms, several individuals present are designated enemy operatives. Mr. Labrador is not authorized access to my system.
“Electromagnetic modulation to vocalization!” Dr. Campbell said, giddy as a drunken schoolgirl. His expression changed quickly with dawning realization. “Mr. Labrador, you need to drop the AI before—”
Mac said, “Black, pacify nonauthorized individuals.” He hadn’t a clue as to whether Black was capable of molding electromagnetic energy into an offensive weapon.
Affirmative, Macbeth Tooms. Assume crash position.
Soul Sucker
Dred wasn’t particularly worried about getting a hole blasted through his spine until Mac started talking to the AI. The younger Tooms brother hadn’t wasted the best winters of his life at the Mountain Leopard Temple for nothing. The instant Black said affirmative, he snapped his torso into his knees and threw himself onto the floor. Whalen’s revolver boomed. A pulse zipped through Dred as if he’d brushed a live wire and made his hair stand on end. Labrador yelped. The lights shorted and cast the compartment into darkness. Gears and metal screeched and the Crawler rolled over and its passengers were flung about and Dred’s skull knocked hard against something.
Dred floated in deep, starless space. Somewhere in the distance, yet drawing near at terrifying velocity, a hideous red light flickered and spread. Horns and flutes played in a discordant chorus, blatting and shrilling. A giant disembodied hand swept through the void and slapped his cheek.
“Are you alive?” Mac said.
“I’m alive.” Dred stared past his brother’s shoulder to a circle of daylight and leafy branches patched by blue sky.
Dimness prevented them from clearly determining the individual fates of their foes. Labrador stank and smoldered like fired charcoal. Mac had struck Whalen in the neck and either killed him or rendered him unconscious. He’d seen Dr. Campbell scramble up toward the light and presumably escape into the woods. Tom the pilot had been impaled by a shorn control lever and his face mashed to jelly against the control panel.
The boys extricated themselves by climbing out the busted dome in the forward section. They stood on the forest floor in the shadow of the wrecked Crawler and caught their breath. Both were contused and lacerated. Dred suspected a cracked rib or two. Decent outcome, considering the circumstances.
Mac removed Black from his coat pocket and set the diamond upon a mossy boulder. After the crash, he had spent several desperate moments fumbling in the gloom for the AI. “Black?”
I am here, Macbeth Tooms.
“Earlier, you mentioned damage to your memory. You said everything associated with Nancy’s flight recorder and data core was corrupted and you suffered memory loss.”
Total file corruption and severe memory degradation localized to NCY-93 data. That is correct.
“Black, you are a Type X crystal and have undergone an accelerated biochemical maturation process. Am I also correct to assume your damaged systems will regenerate?”
The AI was slow to respond. Finally, it said, Yes. Damaged sectors will be restored within six hours. May I suggest—?
Mac crushed Black with the rock he’d concealed behind his hip. He continued savagely smashing the diamond until only powder remained and that he scattered with a scuff of his sleeve. He met Dred’s gaze. “I don’t think Granddad needs to see whatever Black had buried in its memory core.”
“Dang, brother. Isn’t it late in the game to become an altruist?”
“I’m fourteen and a half. I’ve time enough.”
“Seriously. You’re not going soft on me, right?”
“I’m not. We better make a decision about Nancy, though.”
Dred sighed. “Wouldn’t be easy, but with some finagling, we could be on hand prior to launch. A loose heat shield tile, an x instead of a y in the guidance control computer. Bang. She’d break up in orbit or lose power and drift into the gravity well of Jupiter, or wherever. There’d never be an interdimensional jaunt and no meeting with aliens.”
Mac lighted a cigarette. “Or, possibly, we interfere and that’s what sends Nancy into the darkness. I wish Arthur was here to tell us what the play should be.”
“Yeah, and I wish you hadn’t abandoned two of Dad’s favorite rigs. Gotta get the fliptop back, or else.”
“C’mon. We can discuss it over a tall one.”
“Hear, hear.” The brothers, tattered and weary, put an arm over one another’s shoulders and limped for home.
Not long after the boys departed, Whalen emerged from the vehicle. His left arm dangled and he’d lost his hat. He rested against the bole of a pine and immediately fainted. Noises from the cockpit revived him. Somehow, the pilot slid off the lever that had spitted him. He tumbled loose as a ragdoll and hit the ground. Then he stood, his jumpsuit rent in several places and drenched in dried gore, and rearranged his face by aligning bones and cartilage with his thumbs. It worked, somewhat. In an hour or two, all traces of violence would be reversed.
“Hello.” He leaned over Whalen before the smaller man could slither away. Tom’s tongue drooled forth and kissed out the Marine’s eyes. The next kiss sealed Whalen’s mouth and a sharp, deep inhalation took everything worth having.
After a satisfying interval, he lurched to the mossy boulder where the boys had done terrible damage to the AI. He flexed his pale, delicate hands and hummed. Birds dropped, stone dead, around him in a soft patter against the bed of needles and leaves. A sliver of obsidian crystal zinged from the bushes and levitated into his palm. “Oh, Dad. All this just so your son can make a collect call home.” He regarded the jagged sliver, and popped it into his mouth and crunched it methodically, and swallowed.
Tom straightened. “Dr. Campbell? Wait for me!” He walked the opposite way the boys had gone. His stride smoothed and lengthened. He whistled a strange and repellant tune. Every so often, he swung himself around a small tree and clicked his heels.
Azathoth
Azathoth is the origin of all things. Like a spider in its web, the demon-sultan sits upon his black throne at the center of the vortex of primordial chaos, which spirals outward from his throne like the backward turning of a great maelstrom of dark waters.
The spiral is driven into motion by a ring of twelve grotesquely formless gods with flopping, bat-like wings, who never cease to dance naked around the throne to the monotonous notes of a reed flute. They are of gigantic stature, and move across the heavens with slow and awkward steps as they dance, ponderous, mindless, blind and mute. Some say these other gods, who are not the gods of men, make their own music for their dance, but others assert that there is only one flute, and that it is clutched in the monstrous paw of Azathoth, Lord of All.
From this flute fly notes of music infinitely complex and varied, nor does the pattern of the song ever repeat itself, but flows forth forever original and newly coined. The notes of Azathoth’s flute reach the most distant ends of the myriad universes, for it is by their pitch and duration that the proportions of all things that have existence are formed and sustained. Were the music to cease for only a single instant, all of creation would devolve into a sea of confusion. From chaos the mu
sic arises, and the music gives order and form. Without it, chaos must prevail.
The secret of this old one, whispered in dark places deep beneath the ground by ancient things that burrow and coil and sleep, is that Azathoth is an idiot god, both blind and deaf, incapable of speech, who sits naked and drooling, with disheveled hair matted with his own filth. He had no purpose, no plan, no direction, only an unarticulated need to send forth the song arising from his endless waking dream.
That song is forever flawed, for it is said that the flute of Azathoth is cracked, and can never blow a note that is pure and true. No one knows why the flute is cracked, but there is a story told that when Azathoth blew the first note of the song of creation, it was so potent that it cracked the flute, and thereafter the notes were imperfect.
All of the evils of all the myriad worlds within worlds arise from the crack in the flute that emits the song of creation. All created things are imperfect, be that imperfection ever so small that it is almost imperceptible. Every diamond has its flaw, every flower has its worm, every man has his darkness.
Azathoth has been described as a giant with a corpulent belly and bloated limbs. This is no more than a semblance of his true form, which no mind of man can ever comprehend. He is the spark in the primal seed that separated the darkness from the light, and the lower waters of chaos from the orderly cyclical dance of the heavens. He is the sustaining life-force in every living thing in all the worlds.
The old one named Nyarlathotep has a special relationship with Azathoth. He is the messenger of the other gods, who are themselves but extensions of the flute player. Whereas Azathoth creates endlessly without thought or concern for the fitness of his creations, Nyarlathotep applies a critical judgment to Azathoth’s song, and at his whim destroys the order that Azathoth has brought forth. The power of Nyarlathotep is constraint and restriction. It is not given to him to create, and for this reason he both envies and hates Azathoth, who has a power that is forever beyond his understanding or ability.
Azathoth is heedless of his messenger, or of Nyarlathotep’s capricious judgements that return order back to chaos. What matters it to him if a portion of his song is unraveled, when the notes continue to pour forth from his cracked flute like a mighty river, flooding all of the worlds with harmony and proportion? The furthest reaches of space are the architecture of his rhythms, and eternity is the melody of his song.
Petohtalrayn
Bentley Little
There it was again.
Ellison found it in a Pima description of the Hohokam or Those-Who-Have-Vanished, a reference to the Dark Man who had brought an end to that ancient culture. It was the tribe’s version of the Bible’s Apocrypha: unsanctioned, disavowed knowledge meant to be hidden and buried, not shared and shown. Sitting alone in the massive research library of the Huntington, he sorted excitedly through the piles of notes and xeroxed documents that lay spread out on the table before him, looking for the other references. This was not his focus of study, and certainly not a topic that would help with his thesis, but history was made through such accidental discoveries and random connections, and so he dug through the papers, his heart racing. Even though he was only a grad student, it was possible he was the first person to notice the recurrence of this dark chaotic figure across different cultures and time periods.
Possible, but not probable.
There! He found what he was looking for: reference in a Spanish document to the lost peoples of the Nahapi, a little-known Colorado tribe that had disappeared within a generation of the Spaniards’ coming and whose fate had still been spoken about by those with whom they’d traded. Ellison would have to double-check later that it was an accurate translation, but in this English version of a Spanish missionary’s journal, the Nahapi were said to have fled their lands and dispersed, their end brought about by a mysterious black spirit in human form who had arrived from the deserts to the east and sown disease and discontent in its wake.
Ellison pulled out a clean folder, wrote “Dark Man” on the tab, and placed copies of both the missionary’s journal entries and the Pima version of Hohokam history inside. He might not even have made the connection between these two figures had it not been for his recollection of a similar tale in Mayan mythology. Through sheer coincidence, he had written a paper on the Mesoamerican civilization in a cultural anthropology seminar last semester and had learned during his research that the society’s dissolution had supposedly been preceded by the appearance of a dark prophet from the north, a jet-black entity whose predictions of drought and famine, war and pestilence had proved startlingly prescient. It was the remembrance of that unused factoid that had rung a bell when he’d read about the end of the Hohokams. He needed to look up that Mayan information again, add it to the folder, then see if he could find parallels in any other cultural histories.
When he had a chance.
Because he’d have to come back to that later. For now, he had to focus on his thesis. And his upcoming orals. And graduation beyond that. And finding a job…
***
It was another four years before he had occasion to consult the material in the folder again. Truth be told, Ellison had forgotten all about the end-times stories of the mysterious black figure, and it was not until he began sorting through his files, retaining original documents, digitizing copies and recycling vast amounts of needless notepaper, that he came across the folder marked “Dark Man.” He was now a research fellow at Miskatonic University, all the way across the continent from UCLA, and the project on which he was currently working was a joint venture with the British Museum, a survey of archeological discoveries from the golden age of the empire. He’d been invited to spend a month at the museum, researching and chronicling a continental historical narrative based on artifacts being readied for an exhibition, and it was for this reason that he was going through all of his old papers, trying to see if there was anything he could use while in Britain, and taking the opportunity to winnow down what he would probably never need.
William Crowley was the British archeologist with whom he’d be working most closely, and it was Crowley who met him at the door of the museum on his first day. Ellison had been expecting a stuffy academic, an elderly man of the type who would not look ridiculous muttering a disapproving, supercilious “Really,” but Crowley turned out to be relaxed, spiky haired and only a few years older than himself. The two of them hit it off immediately, and that morning was spent on a tour of the back rooms in which they’d be doing most of their work.
It was a few days later, while looking over the translated details of some Minoan pictographs, that Crowley casually mentioned the similarities between Crete and the New World, commenting on how it was interesting that the harbingers of destruction for both the Minoans and the Anasazi were so similar. Before the disappearance of both civilizations, he noted, a mysterious dark personage was supposed to have appeared out of the wilderness, a herald of the chaos to come who had sown political dissent in Crete before bringing about widespread infertility among females of all classes, and had struck down by supernatural means swaths of villages in the American Southwest.
So Ellison had not been the first person to notice the cross-cultural parallels of the Dark Man. It was expected, but he still felt disappointed. Secretly, he’d hoped to be the one to uncover an entirely new link between seemingly disparate societies. Finding out others had beat him to it left him feeling slightly let down.
Still, there was no reason he couldn’t shine new light on an existing theory, and so he vowed that in his spare time—not that he had much spare time—he would carefully research correspondences between apocalyptic myths involving various countries’ vanished civilizations.
It was a week or two later that he spoke of his extracurricular interests to Crowley. The two of them were eating lunch—fish and chips—on the rear steps of the museum, watching men unloading crates of loaned Egyptian artifacts under an uncharacteristically blue sky, when Ellison brought up the Dark Man
and told Crowley about the folder he’d started in grad school. Downplaying his initial ambitions, he described how he’d found references to the black figure in stories about the Nahapi tribe and the lost Hohokam after coming across a similar tale while researching the Mayan civilization for a graduate seminar. “And there’s a myth involving almost the same figure bringing about the end of the Minoans? I didn’t know that until you told me, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The interesting question is, how do these stories travel? I mean, many of these societies are millennia apart, and in areas of the world that, to our knowledge, had no cultural contact. How do such similar concepts appear in such disparate folklore?”
“Maybe it has a basis in truth,” Crowley said.
“You mean—”
“I don’t mean anything.” Crowley crumpled up the greasy bag that had been holding his lunch. “Come on. We’d best get back to work. We have a lot to do.”
Basis in truth. Something about the way he’d said it made Ellison think the archeologist knew more than he was letting on. Or, at the very least, had some pretty well-formed suspicions.
Ellison knew the man well enough by now to know that Crowley wouldn’t form suspicions without some solid backing evidence.
Still, he didn’t press, deciding to play it cool and bide his time, wanting to unearth some evidence of his own before attempting to broach the subject in any more depth.
An encounter the next day with some of the supplementary survey materials accompanying the Minoan pictographs led to his discovery of a translation of the Dark Man’s name.
Petohtalrayn
It was, as far as he could determine, a nonsensical appellation from the early nineteenth century, given to the Minoan figure by one of the British scholars who had first attempted a translation. Not Latin but meant to resemble Latin. Spoken phonetically, the word sounded like “Pet total rain,” and while he knew that the English from that time period did not correlate exactly to the language spoken today, the links were actually pretty close. It certainly wasn’t Old English, and a small, excited part of him wondered if the name was a reference to the Flood.