The A'Rak

by Michael Shea

  "But why dost thou not visit me?" jollied Urmodd. "Doubt not your welcome here! Leap over now! Can you? Perhaps it is too far?"

  A wager then? My answers without cost if I do leap?

  "Bravely spoken! Any odds my friends? Who'll lay me. . . ."

  In the midst of their jollity I sprang—they had looked for some slight tautening at least, some little flexing of preparation, but in one instant I was airborne, amidst them in the next, and they exploding all directions skywards.

  Except for Urmodd, whom I had jailed within my legs, and had pinned to the stone with one fang—so delicately! Piercing him not quite, but denting his flesh teasingly, testingly, the effusion of my venom but a twitch shy of flooding him.

  Jest with me, wilt thou, thou jury-rigged vermin? Thou grotesque contrivance, thou fly-blown carrion bat?

  For these Crawbags were like many of those solar refugees, who, wave on wave, from world to world had fled before our ruddy sun's tumescence, and ended here. Such refugees came carrying a mad, broken baggage of fragmentary technologies. From these they had here unpacked a quaint, pitiful array of strategies to survive, which meant primarily to evade my race's fangs—for these immigrants fell like a feast before us.

  And Urmodd here, seen so close, plainly displayed the signs of his body's co-tenant, the Gorgon-fly which all Crawbags contained at birth, and which grew along with its host to snugly enveloped adulthood. This insect's mouthparts extruded—discreetly—from an opening in Urmodd's throat (for the Gorgon-fly too fed on carrion, of which Urmodd conveyed as many titbits to his throathole as to his own lips), while from Urmodd's hairy brow a black pimpling of the insect's eyebuds peeped from amid the follicles. The Gorgon-fly's contributions to its host were largely invisible from without—its chitinous struts and cross braces, interlaced with the Crawbag's natural skeleton, gave Urmodd's wings their mighty span and power.

  "Do you mock our allegiance with the Gorgon-fly, great A'Rak?" Urmodd's calm galled me. How I wanted whatever it was he knew! "We lesser beings must still contrive to lead our little lives, great one! Your own primordial might and purity of form could only be admired, never matched by refugees such as we! But I believe you have come to learn if we have seen more of the awesome unquiet in the sky. Is it not so?"

  It is. If you have somewhat to answer, you may purchase your life with it.

  "I have somewhat to answer—more than you dream of. But my release must precede the answering. If this suits you not, devour me and have done."

  I released him. From his indifference, I possessed already the essence of his answer. I released him and humbly awaited his response, which he, taking wing, gave me from the air.

  "You cannot fly above these clouds, as we have done. But from on high we have seen that the rack has dissipated along the shore. Haste down to Clatterstone Strand, then, and view the heavens, and you will have your answer."

  They were all on the wing now, past reaching. I cursed them for their contemptuous dismissal, but oceanwards the cloudrack did indeed seem to be breaking up. The planetbone itself felt ever more alive beneath my tarsal claws. Whatever was a-borning here was coming fast. I wheeled and plunged back down the way I'd come.

  A'RAK II

  I hastened back down the cragface, and back the way I had come, save that as I neared the coast, I wasted no time following streamcourses and other low ground, for rumors were already sweeping inland from the shoreside, and highway and hillside alike were thronged with hordes hastening seawards, just as I was doing, to view the unfolding in our heavens.

  Eerie it was to run with every species of my prey hastening on all sides of me, the throng of them regarding my overlooming presence less and less as the influx of rumor wild-fired through the host and drew us all forward in ever hotter haste.

  Our grand stampede attained the crest of the last range of hills before the sea, and there the vast host of us paused, and ran no more, but foamed and eddied in a frenzied, clamorous standstill, like surf against a seawall. Over the ocean before us, a rising wind was scouring the last wisps of cloud-ceiling from the sky, and we beheld the sun.

  Still it rives my heart! The mere recollection of that sight holds still a little death for my heart! Our sun, that roseate orb, just risen clear of the horizon, was bleeding to death before her planet's stunned gaze! From her upper rim a thick, pink ribbon of her substance rivered off her circumference. In a gracefully undulant banner, this broad stream of sun-stuff arched up and plunged behind our rubicund mother-star into the just-glimpsed maw of the monster that was devouring her!

  Through our sky's rosy canopy we could just make out the monster, as one in an illumined room, peering at windows interiorly lit, can just make out a shape in the darkness beyond the glass. For above and behind our sun was an even greater disk than hers, a vortex whose rim was a white blaze fed by our sun's off-streaming matter. Her radiant blood, rivering back, was snatched into this vortex's incandescent whirl, flaring briefly round its rim, to vanish in the dark nullity it enclosed!

  A sun-sucking whirlpool! Arthro-Pan'doloron and her sun, with countless other suns, was being swallowed into the whirling maw of the Galactivore!** [[see editor's note at chapter's end—Shag Margold]]

  Our very sun in bloody tatters torn, devoured—with the sanguinary welter of her cosmic slaughter staining half our heavens! What wonder that we, her myriad doomed spawn, did as we did?

  Myself this madness seized like earthquake: a volcanic imperative to feed, feed, feed. My lifeblood—I comprehend it now—surged tidally to race towards annihilation's farther shore. I must grow to budding size, I must breed, my self must shed its smaller selves in myriads; my utter cancellation, writ gigantic in the empurpled zenith, must thus itself be cancelled! This mad illogic lifted me; with tenfold speed and strength I whirled about me, and slew, and slew, and slew!

  And all other races of a predatory make were likewise enflamed at once. Discretion, stealth or temporary truce were all alike cast to the winds, and all across the hills, and up and down the swarming shingle, cries of onslaught chorused with the shrill replies of mortal pain. Barbed beak and talon, rasping maw and sucking fang—all sank to their red work!

  Nor were the races of the preyed-upon in flight. These wall-raising, weapon-bearing ones seemed fired with a madness like the carnivores' frenzy—theirs not a fury to feed, but to slay Death, as if, by killing such killers as their blades could cut, they might together kill that Death in the sky, which none of us could touch. I saw marvels on that mad morning! I saw farming folk with torches and pruning hooks overwhelm, butcher and burn A'Raks of a stature not far short of my own. Huge-muscled Snerrls big as cottages stormed in from the tundras and ravened up all smaller fry, till the Glasques—dwarfish viticulturists of the coastal hills—joined forces with Kin-Kozm's artillery, and the ballistas hurled flaming wine-casks filled with oil to ignite the brutes' shaggy pelts, soprano-ing their warcries up to death-shrieks. . . .

  How long was my world plunged in war with itself, like a monster knotted in the agony of feasting on its own entrails? Our bleeding sun, backed by the maw consuming her, had half sunk to her setting, her last setting!—when I was torn from my feeding frenzy by a stroke of awe that pierced me through. I crouched—unwieldy with the bulging of my engorged abdomen—and harkened to a high, keen note I heard faintly—faintly!—approaching the vast melee from afar.

  I have told you, Thief, of the demon who—alone in my cosmos—made prey of my kind. This monstrous she-demon was monarch of our skies when, at long intervals, she took wing to hunt us. She came when she had marked among us a victim grand enough to house her egg. Thus housed—horrible to relate—her offspring hatched and ate her frozen, living lodgement hollow! And it was traditionally said of her comings that, when she came, that a'rak among us she had particularly marked for her quarry would hear the whine of her advent with a particular clarity, even as I heard it now.

  Thus, at a stroke, did I learn that now, as my world died, the demon had come for a
last meal upon my kind, and I was the meal she had chosen.

  Here was I, greatest of a'rak kind in the South-East Seas—chosen now. For of course, must not the demon feel at our sun's death that same imperative that frenzied us all?

  I fled as madly as a hundred thousand prey had futilely fled before me in my time. I was grossly swollen and unwieldy with my delirious feasting, but I summoned desperation's strength, and fled to the nearest vent, and down into the chasm-coombs.

  I dove deep in the world-bone's embrace, my natural solace. It was mere desperation. I knew full well what would ensue long before I'd reached the Sunless Sea. Already the shrill, razor-keen song of Pam'Pel's wings began to resonate in the subterranean maze behind me, following fast, and following faster.

  Her wingsong by itself stabbed me with a mortal pain; it engendered a deep vibration that made the stone's least touch a torment to my flesh. Will-less, nigh mindless, I fled as on flaming claws, striving to reach the Sunless Sea, knowing I would fail.

  She overtook me in a mighty-vaulted chamber. What use rehearse my helpless wardings, feints, and counter-strokes? Had I then but the might and mass I now possess, our battle would surely have had a different issue—as, if indeed she comes again, it will have now! In that encounter, as my world was seized by the galactic predator, so I was seized by Pam'Pel, and because I was slain, I was saved, as you shall hear. At that moment, of course, I knew only my death, saw her eyes already devouring me when her stinger struck me. That icy fang, flame-quick, yet seemed an eternity piercing me! Icy paralysis gripped all my parts. My body became inert, the bulky coffin of my limbless terror. She seized me and began to drag me to her . . . nursery chamber.

  And where was this? Why, she dragged me down to the very refuge I had been trying to reach! Down to the marge of the Sunless Sea she dragged me. I grasped this as she dragged me deeper and deeper down through the chasm-coombs. And indeed, where more natural to flee a monster in the heavens, than in one's world's bowels?

  By the time we came down at last to the shore of the Sunless Sea, even in my numbness I felt the world-bone wailing and booming about us, and saw the massy waters, lurid-litten in fungal phosphoresence, heaving and dancing like mad mountains. High up on the quivering strand she laid me, her venom my infallible bondage upon me, and went to work. With her dire, black jaws she began to chew great blocks of bedrock out of the strand.

  Only the vast dim feverlight of the Sea breathed faint form upon the towering vaults of our racked world. Pam'Pel's implacable jaws and her caustic spittle crushed metallic seams from the stone. She was, I grasped, when its bottom and two of its sides were laid, constructing a great sarcophagus of Arthro-Pan'doloron's bedrock. Her race were always diggers of tombs for my race, and though she'd chosen this far deeper, fore-made sepulcher, her delver's powers she still employed.

  And I grasped it all soon enough, helplessly watching her toils while the planet's foundations groaned and fretted around us, creaking and shuddering towards the last like an old ship's timbers in a destroying sea: this vast casket was for me. She had not yet implanted me, the which she could do mortally quick, in her desperation to make a vessel for me and her brood within me—a vessel to seal out, if possible, the Cataclysm descending.

  And as the planet cracked and spasmed and splintered around us, it dawned on me that the terror of this commotion involved no feeling of an imminent collapse, of burial in fallen rock.

  No! The terror was the feeling that the world foundation was pulling away from us. It was a feeling of imminent explosion, of floor and wall and ceiling straining to flee us, to fly suddenly asunder and leave us floating naked in a Void. . . .

  Madly she toiled on my coffin. The fury of her extinction-defying gambit was a thing of awe. She had the huge casket fashioned; she gnawed out the massy lid to seal it. Once she had me armor-shod, she would implant me with lightning strokes, willing only then to release her precious eggs naked into my fortressed flesh.

  And in this her blind bid to fox our world's fate—in this, Thief, lay my salvation! Bare seconds too late was Pam'Pel! Bare seconds unbound me from the sure death she had all but shackled to me!

  She laid me in my massy box, half-hinged its lid in place—all while the Sunless Sea towered up in glowering peaks, and the planet convulsed. Then she mounted, faltering in the growing turbulence—mounted then the coffin, and drew up her gaster to empierce my abdomen.

  And just then, with a howl that came abruptly to an utter silence, sea and bedrock exploded everywhere away at once—stone to sand and water to flashing fog, both like dense smoke snaked spiralling away in all directions, and we were plunging, plunging, through an utter blackness, an utter silence, an utter cold.

  What can I say of Time in what ensued?! Long, and long, and long, I was, and I fell, and I saw not.

  Eons later, still I fell, but suddenly, in all directions, there were stars.

  They were no stars I recognized, and were more thinly strewn than those that roofed the nights of Arthro-Pan'doloron, but stars they were, and their light relieved at last the nothingness! And here was my coffin round me, lid wide ajar, slowly tumbling in the starshine, and in this tumbling I came round, and round again, and knew a terror that shook me deeper than any I have told thee yet.

  Just behind me—gaster advanced, her vast eyes looming—Pam'Pel closely pursued me.

  In a frozen pursuit, I realized. I saw I was one piece of a cloud of debris that fell together, and that just behind me, slowly tumbling in time to my tumble, her useless wings as frozen as my limbs, the demon hung dead, or dead-seeming, her eyes unknowing as black ice. . . .

  Time ground mutely on. The starfield—ah so gradually!—altered. And, just as gradually, one particular star—towards which we seemed to fall—grew brighter than the rest.

  Our long descent toward your world I will not recount. Its little gold coin of a sun seemed a stingy affair (could it be the model of your race's odd lust for minted gold?) but I gave less thought to this azure orb than I did to my condition once aground here, for I did not doubt I could prevail and prosper here, had I but movement, and my limbs' free use.

  And this—oh miracle on miracle!—I began to regain! Never before had the demon's paralytic been put to such a test of time! At last, I began to outwear it.

  Indeed, it was a close thing at the last, as if this whole chain of wonders that had brought me here had been precisely clocked, each marvel to dovetail snugly and precisely with the next. My forelegs and my palps first thawed—little by little, but each awakening tingle rang a mighty peal of hope within my soul! Our stately drift toward this world became a plunge, even as my hind limbs thawed, and stirred, and answered my will at last!

  Even as we plunged in our swarm of broken stone, diving towards the melting continents of cloud that sheathe this globe, even as the orb grew vast, obliterating every other sight, I had nestled in my coffin, and drawn the lid shut, manipulating it like a crude vessel, captaining at last what I had so long lain in like a living corpse.

  A murderous heat briefly enveloped me; then a steaming, thunderous impact stunned me—I sank through water, fathoms of steaming, bubbling brine. Cold silt boiled up around our final resting place, and slowly settled back down around us, and still more slowly, stunned, I crawled from my crypt and beheld my new condition.

  Here was Pam'Pel's lifeless form amid the trans-stellar debris, those few paltry remnant pebbles of our devoured cosmos! On my would-be murderess' corpse I threw myself. I tore her limbs and broke her body. When at length I turned away, I left her—I know I left her—dead, a carcass forever void of life!

  How strange it is, this passion that has filled me to impart my past to thee, O Thief! Of my doings here I feel no urge to tell thee—they are recorded, amply enough, here and there among thy kind!

  The passion was pity, in part, I think! Pity for my vanished world! How odd, how comically poignant, seem I now to myself, Oh Thief! To have made this urgent confession of my poor world's death—to have
in whispering haste entrusted the whole gigantic tragedy to thine ear. To have thrust so huge a fact upon the paltry witness of an ephemeral nothing like thyself!

  And yet how strangely it pleases me to have done so, to have murmured this Muchness in a dust-mite's ear! It amuses me to take this ironic precaution against Extinction's grand irony, and bequeath the whole treasure of my world's long glory to the leaky, shallow vessel of thine understanding.

  Meanwhile let the precaution's slightness declare my confidence. However and in what state the demon has survived, her kind have never faced an a'rak of half my might, for kindly Hagia's safety and rich pastures have nourished me far past her species' ken.

  Meanwhile if the long odds fall, I am provided for. Speak my tale, then, Thief, among thy fellows. Mayhap it might live on a day or so among such windblown Nothings as thou art!

  Withdraw now. Thaw out the priest with wine. He'll pay thee, and perhaps thou'lt assist him with thy footpad's suavities in this day's great business of golden donative! Farewell, Thief.

  [[Editor's Note:

  The entity Galactivore, if entity it be, is but scantly attested to in any document that my personal researches have uncovered. The immortal Parple, of course, among his Pandects, has bequeathed us his rendering of the High Archaic fragment Galactivore Imperator, and the careful reader will detect in those verses a being or agency not unlike that glimpsed by the spidergod at his world's extinction. I here supply a copy of the lines for the reader's convenience.

  —Shag Margold]]

  * * *

  Galactivore Imperator

  Galactivore Imperator

  A wheel of suns to tatters tore

  And at one stroke, its denizens

  drave from their earthen tenements

  These denizens were myriad

  un-wombed from loins unwearied