Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Dundas knocked and pressed and hammered on the door. Eventually it began to tilt inward from the top and slip diagonally away from the bottom, to the accompaniment of the sound of heavy stones grinding across each other. The stone portal’s noisy slippage slowly revealed a green-black ramp, angling downward into darkness.

  Dundas followed the ramp into the palpable blackness. He was relieved to see ahead of him, at last, a light. It turned out to be a phosphorescently blue-glowing sign that read DONOVAN, GUERRERA, & ANGSTROM’S. Although the name sounded like a law firm—and from their attire the men and women gathered there might very well have been lawyers—Dundas was relieved to see that, despite its decor of seaweed and ooze and barnacled rock and shipwreck, it was only a bar. Ambient music—sounding like sea chanteys, jigs and hornpipes being garbled inside a monstrous belly— played, just barely obtrusively, in the background. Behind the bar stood two dark, heavily tattooed gentlemen in the garb of merchant mariners from a century past.

  “Excuse me,” Dundas said to the nearer of the two, who appeared to be African, “would you tell me where I might find Professor Angell?”

  “Ronnie, you mean?” asked the ear-beringed bartender without looking up from where he swabbed the bar. “Over at the Vigilant. Getting things set up at Cyclopea for tonight.”

  “Not at Cyclopea,” said the other bartender, Middle Eastern by his accent. “At Pickman’s Studio.”

  The nearer bartender shrugged.

  “Same diff,” he said. “Just head down the back ramp here, then across the linked gangways past the Emma to the elevator for the Vigilant. That’s the big freighter.”

  “Thanks,” Dundas said, taking his leave.

  Getting anywhere in the maze of ships proved more difficult than he expected, however. He made his way down corridors so geometrically skewed and full of optical illusions they would make the soberest of men think he was drunk. Passing through the bowels of the Emma, he encountered glowing clumps of what looked like lunar fungi, heard rats in the walls and slopping scuttling sounds before and behind him. Through it all he moved among faint but persistent stenches, the hanging olfactory wave fronts of pervasive miasmas—of age, rot, decay.

  Moving along the foggy gangways between the Emma and the Vigilant, he never knew whether the next person he encountered was going to be an ordinary, more or less sane guest like himself, or an employee convincingly acting the part of a muttering crazy woman or shrieking madman—of which there were a seemingly inexhaustible supply.

  Finding his way around inside the cavernous spaces of the Vigilant was even worse. He passed bars and ballrooms and restaurants that featured convincing holos of voodoo rituals, ancient tribes dancing to hideous idols on stone altars, shamans and shamankas calling up devilish spirits out of fire. In one room, viscid color flashed from what looked like a meteorite, and great arcs of real electricity blasted the stone, until odd, curiously animate color flashed into a clouded night sky, out of what looked like the stone circle of an old-fashioned well on the other side of the long room.

  At last Dundas reached Pickman’s Studio, a broad ballroom done up as a combination studio, art gallery, and catacomb. Floored in wood, with a thick, brick-walled depression like a well or kiva off in one corner, it was lit by what appeared to be acetylene light, which gave an odd cast to the already morbid artwork displayed throughout—nightmare paintings and blasted funerary statues larger, more perverse, more murderous, and much more horrific than life. A sound like the movements of enormous rats issued from the brick-walled depression in the corner. Something about the space suggested the entrance to a vast network of subterranean tunnels.

  “Excuse me,” Dundas called out to the workers who were bolting one last grotesque statue to a plate in the floor, under the careful direction of the dark-haired, black-clad woman overseeing them. “Is there a Professor Angell—um, Ronnie—here?”

  The woman with the long dark hair turned in the uncertain light

  “Is it you, Mister Dundas?” the woman asked in slightly accented British English as she came toward him and he nodded, disoriented. He hadn’t expected a female contact. “You came at the right moment. We’ve just finished up here. Would coffee and a table over at The Terrible Old Man suit you? It’s on the deck of the Emma.”

  “Sounds fine,” Dundas said, not knowing what to expect in this mad place. Ronnie gave a few final suggestions to the men and women she’d been overseeing, then Dundas followed her out of Pickman’s Studio.

  As they made their way back through the bowels of the Vigilant and on toward the Emma, Ronnie spoke casually, like a tour guide, pointing out fungi of Yuggoth, holos depicting the color out of space, the plateau of Leng, the sunken city of R’lyeh, Kadath in the Cold Waste, witches and demons, creatures like Nyarlathotep and the Elder Gods and Yog-Sothoth. She spoke theatrically of the “mad Arab Abdul Alhazred and his Necronomicon”, and explained, with some relish, how a mass of meat maggots stripping flesh from bones made a noise exactly like the crackling of Rice Krispies in milk, so when they had needed the sound of enormous coffin-worms they’d just miked and milked some breakfast cereal, then amplified the result.

  She seemed quite a part of the madness here, so much so that Dundas wondered if a mistake had been made somewhere up the chain of command. After they’d picked up their coffee and sat down at a table on the fogbound and otherwise deserted foredeck of the Emma, however, Ronnie Angell glanced around to make sure no one was in earshot, then turned to him.

  “So, Ray,” she said, “what do you think of our little ‘Wonderful World of Satan’ here?”

  “That it is,” he said, smiling and feeling relieved. “A regular theme park of the Anti-Christ.”

  “More than you know,” she said, sipping her coffee. “Are you familiar with Lovecraft’s work, or the Cthulhu mythos?”

  “Only by reputation,” he said. A sloppy plashing sound came from somewhere near the bow, distracting him, though he saw nothing. “The only thing I really remember from what we covered in Intelligence all those years ago is that black-magic book, the Necronomicon. All the other names you threw at me along the way mean almost less than nothing. You’re in pretty deep cover, aren’t you, here among the mud souls?”

  “Not much deeper than you among the mole-hippies,” she said shrugging back her long hair and smiling. “These—”

  They were interrupted by a sudden loud flopping like distended fire hoses dropping onto the deck from out of the fog. It took a moment before Dundas realized what he was staring at: a pair of long, whitish-pink tentacular arms ending in ovate, gray-pink pads covered with sharp-toothed suckers. The sucker pads began scraping across the deck. Behind those, more tentacle arms came creeping and scraping and scuttling over the bow, followed in quick succession by a beaklike mouth, satellite-dish eyes and a torpedo-shaped head that seemed to rise up and up and up.

  “Good God!” Dundas exclaimed, leaping to his feet. “What on Earth is that?”

  “Sit down, sit down,” Ronnie said, laughing. Five workers with U-topped poles ran out onto the deck. “It’s just a Cthulhoid. One of the Arkies. Architeuthis. Giant squid.”

  Astonished, Dundas watched as the workers used their U-topped poles to keep the flopping and grasping tentacles away from guests or anything else breakable. He moved back to his chair at last, but slowly.

  “Is it real?” he asked Ronnie as he began to gradually sit down.

  “Certainly,” she said, amused. “Looks like you’re in luck: it’s ol’ Tentacle Face himself. He’s the biggest of the five, over twenty meters long. The other four are all under twenty.”

  Dundas stared at her.

  “Does this happen often?” he asked.

  “About once an hour,” she said, smiling. “You really don’t know anything about Cthulhutessen, do you? These big fellas are the stars. The feature attraction.”

  “You mean they’re trained?” he asked, watching the squid-control crew in action with their guide-poles. “To attack t
he patrons?”

  “Not the patrons—just these boats,” Ronnie explained, placidly swirling her coffee in its cup. “Cthulhutessen is Clyde Kanaka’s brain-child. He’s a Lovecraft fan, as you might have guessed. He used to be the chief squid man over at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, before he came up with his grand design. His bosses at the aquarium wanted nothing to do with a plan to turn giant cephalopods into animal performers, so he sold the Cthulhutessen idea to investors—mainly Disney, NHK, and Deep Flight Recreational Subs. That paid for a research ship with a deep-flier sub aboard. So he could begin following sperm whales on their feeding rounds. You did know that sperm whales feed on giant squid, right?”

  “I’ve heard that, yes,” Dundas said, watching the pole-wielders pushing and shoving the enormous squid back off the bow, back toward the ocean.

  “Well, Kanaka tracked the sperm whales until he located some sizable Architeuthis,” Ronnie continued. “He drove off the sperm whales with heavy sonar noise and took his deep-flier down among the squid. Architeuthids are basically big slow cruisers, so it wasn’t that difficult for him to partially paralyze them. Then he installed behavior-mod implants in the brains of the five biggest ones he came across—along with a sonar whale-spooker and a GPS locator, as well. He marched them back here. Essentially he’s turned the whole of Monterey Bay into an aquarium for them.”

  Dundas stared, watching the last great pair of long tentacles finally slide over the bow. Coffee cups in hand, he and Ronnie got up and went to the railing, gazing on as the squid crew grabbed buckets filled with a variety of stunned seafood and began dumping it over the side. There the giant squid—even more impressive floating at full, two-bus length just off the bow of the Emma than it had been, slithering awkwardly aboard—waited for its easy-feed reward.

  “How are they prevented from swimming back out into the rest of the Pacific?” he asked

  “The locators and the brain implants do that, in conjunction with the computers onboard the administrative whaler over there, the Rachel,” Ronnie said, gesturing. “I don’t know all the details, but I gather that the closer one of these tentacle-heads gets to an arc running from just above Santa Cruz across the bay to Monterey, the more their tracking locators set up a ‘negative reinforcement’ electrical charge in their brain implants. The closer they come to the border line, the more splitting the headaches they get.”

  Dundas watched the enormous form of the Architeuthis, ghostly and pale gray-pink, picking off its stunned prey. A few of its targets woke up and scurried out of range, but the sprawling creature seemed content enough.

  “What about the whales that feed on them?” Dundas asked.

  “The sonar noise-makers handle them,” Ronnie said. “No sperm whale in its right mind would want to get within 500 meters of any of them. Kanaka takes a lot of heat about ‘driving cetaceans out of the Bay’ from his former colleagues over at the Aquarium, but I think even they can see why he wouldn’t want to let his Arkies turn into a whole lot of very expensive calamari.”

  Dundas watched the big squid finishing off the last of its prey.

  “I suppose there are a lot of eco-pagans to keep happy hereabouts?” he speculated,

  “Especially in Santa Cruz,” Ronnie said with a nod. “They still do their little protests sometimes, despite Kanaka massaging their ideologies as much as possible. He even became a member of the Church of the Grateful Dead, the largest local denomination.”

  She turned around, leaning against the ship’s railing.

  “The greenies really don’t have all that much to complain about anyway,” she went on. “Giant squid don’t appear to be in any danger of extinction. The Monterey trench goes more than a thousand meters down, deep enough to match the Arkies’ feeding zone. Cthulhutessen has begun a captive breeding program, all the usual public relations.”

  “What about the fact that they’re ‘trained’?” Ray asked.

  “They can’t complain that much about the training,” she said, shaking her head. “Standard Pavlovian stuff. An electrical bell ringing in the squids’ big heads 500 fathoms down, calling them to do their trick and earn their dinner. The animal rightists can’t even complain that the critters are particularly overworked. We’re open 10 A.M. to midnight—fourteen hours. Five squid in the rotation, so each animal performs less than once every three hours. They’ve got it easy.”

  “But the scientists at the aquarium across the bay still don’t like it?” Dundas asked, watching the big squid slowly submerging.

  “Not at all,” Ronnie said, draining off the last of her coffee. “They’ve got their scientific and ideological reasons, I suppose. For them, Kanaka’s work is more evidence of the same ‘dominator belief system’ that overfished the oceans—until now jellyfish are the largest fishery, as they are always saying. They made some noise too because that Light thing spooked the big Arkies, but that’s settling down too, now. What I think it really comes down to is that Cthulhutessen cuts into the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s market share. It’s all entertainment, ultimately, competing for the patron’s spare time and spare change.”

  She looked at him fixedly for a moment—a very acute gaze. “The cover story I’ve been putting out for your trip here today, for instance, is that you’re an eccentric psiXtian who is thinking of investing in this place. The psiXtians are ultragreen. Cthulhutessen management would love to have them on board.”

  “Wouldn’t have carried as much clout if you told them I was from the Autonomous Christian States, I suppose?” Dundas asked slyly.

  “Might have blown your cover,” Ronnie said thoughtfully as they watched the big squid at last jet away and disappear, leaving only a cloud of what might have been ink behind. “I don’t think the management would have refused you, though. It’s all money, and they’ll accept that from anybody. The place is already halfway to becoming a slithery, scuttly theme park. I bet even Kanaka would be willing to drop any mention of the Necronomicon, the Elder Gods—all the overtly Satanic and black magical stuff—for a healthy infusion of ACSA cash. Just as long as no one takes away his ‘devil-fish’.”

  Dundas turned his back on the bow and leaned against the railing too.

  “Not that the ACSA has much money to invest anywhere these days,” he said quietly, thinking of the economic conditions in the mountains and northern plains far away.

  “Nor Cthulhutessen that much need for investors,” Ronnie agreed, returning to sit down at their table. “You’ve come on a weekday in off-hours. During peak rushes we get huge crowds. Have to run sixty launches an hour. Tourists from all over the world—even some from the ACSA. You should see this place at night and on weekends. Those are the heavy times, what with the squid glowing phosphorescently when they attack and disappearing in a cloud of bioluminescent ink when they’re done. It’s a real show-stopper. Underwater fireworks.”

  She looked into her empty coffee cup, then turned to him as he sat down, having watched the last of the squid crew leave the deck.

  “That’s not why you’re here, though,” she said, reaching into her jacket pocket and producing a small, clear grastic envelope. “Intelligence couldn’t risk a drop on this. I think we’ve discussed Cthulhutessen enough now so that if anyone were randomly running surveillance on us, they’ve long since switched off the recorder. I’ve already checked and cleared the disk with your instructions inside. Looks like you might get another shot at an old target of yours—Diana Gartner.”

  Dundas’s eyes widened an instant in surprise.

  “She’s become quite a pilot over the years,” Ronnie said, glancing up at him. “Makes runs down the well from the orbital habitats in something called a SHADOW, Stealth High Altitude Delta Observation Wing—a single stage to orbit, transatmospheric spyplane, for those of us not initiated into aerospace industry acronyms.”

  Dundas grunted, his interest piqued.

  “What’s she doing with a single-stage spyplane?” he asked.

  “Nominally, Gartner’s doing green o
verflights,” Angell said. “Biomass mapping, that sort of thing. We think she’s doing a lot more—and that she’s using psiXtian communes as landing, refueling, and smuggling sites. Our people broke a hypercoded communication indicating she’s getting ready to make a big northern hemisphere run. We’ve moved an operative into her flight crew up in the ’borbs. Keep your eyes open at Sunderground. We think she’s almost certain to make a stop at the Central Valley commune during her trip. She has close friends there.”

  She handed him the grastic envelope.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking it and slipping it into his pocket.

  “No—thank you, Mister Dundas,” she said, rising from the table. “Any other information you may need can be found on the disk, which also has some interesting security-key functions—which is the real reason you had to come all this way personally. This will be our last communication for the foreseeable future.”

  She gave him that same pointed stare again, then finished her thought.

  “Take care. These greeners, peaceniks, and rainbow Satanists aren’t as out of touch as they look. This is a longer, deadlier fight than you can guess. If we lose, true Christian identity isn’t just defeated—it’s extinct. God-fearing white people will be overrun. Race-mixed out of existence. Overwhelmed in cross-breeding the way the hard-working European honeybee was, by its aggressive but less productive southern cousins. Good-bye, and Godspeed.”

  She left him then. The honeybee reference, he realized immediately, was the final counterword, taken straight from Guaranty’s Myth’s Edge and Nation. After the King James Bible, that was the most important text of the Christian Autonomy movement.