With a Pavlovian reaction that tears at her gut and opens the floodgates of her memory, letting loose a torrent of buried images and sensations tied to the child who once gestated in her own womb, Eliana realises that the thing attached to the side of the alien craft is an egg. Her stomach dry-heaving, hand across her mouth, Eliana struggles to subdue the raging floodwaters crashing through her mind: images of her son laughing; his tiny hand in hers; his first step across bare, clattering floorboards; the soft, downy smell of him in the spring air; his first breath in an antiseptic hospital; his last, choking gasp for air as he convulsed and simply slipped away, cradled in her arms, her hot tears running through his hair and down into his staring eyes; his unmoving flesh clutched to her breast.
These and innumerable other moments, captured in refracted amber, steal the breath from her lungs and now, she does disgorge the contents of her stomach, what little there is in it rushing up as bile and sluicing out over her lips to blob and float away. Followed by tears that do likewise and choking sobs that echo in the small confines of the Lacrima’s cabin.
As Eliana cries, the tendrils of the thing inside the egg cease moving and it pulses once, deeply. For a few moments, it is silent, utterly still, as Eliana is wracked with the outpouring agony of her long-repressed grief. And then, all the tentacles of the immense, spacefaring entity thunder against the egg’s outer membrane at once, releasing a torrent of gravimetric waves that traverse the empty space between the alien craft and the Lacrima, slamming up against the pitted, already-cracked surface of the decaying vessel.
Eliana rocks in her straps as her ship shakes violently in the gravimetric storm. And then, one of the straps, long overdue for replacement, tears and she is hurtling through the cabin to smash up against the open viewport at the front of the cabin. Her head cracks sharply against the well-reinforced, poly-paned glass. And then there is only silence.
***
In the darkness in which she floats, there is a voice. It is her son’s. She knows this without thinking. It is as automatic a recognition as the ceaseless, effortless work of breathing. Eyes opening on a vast plane of darkness where no stars lie, she sees herself floating, then comes to stand upright on an unseen sense of solidity beneath her.
Her son is before her, rushing toward her, his small legs pumping quickly across illusory, solid terrain that cannot be seen, but is nonetheless felt. But Eliana has been here, before. She knows the illusion for what it is, even in this state, somewhere between dream and memory. Always, always in her mind is the knowledge of his death. Ingrained so deeply that neither sleep nor dream can steal the knowledge from her. She holds herself erect, dream eyes closed as her dead son throws his arms around her and holds her tight. She clenches her jaw and looks away from the small, thick arms cradled around her upper thighs and the warm, soft head nestled up against her navel.
Again, she damns her subconscious mind for thinking this will bring her peace or a measure of comfort. Doesn’t her symbol-ridden sense of self understand that nothing will ever be right again?
She keeps her eyes shut against the sight of her long-dead child, but opens them when the arms pull back and the warmth of him moves away. That’s new. Confused, Eliana opens her eyes. Before her stands her son, his head cocked at an angle, his body naked and pristine, so unlike the actual state of him in death, when the lesions had blossomed on his rosy flesh and his skin had rotted away in great weeping chunks. But there is something wrong with him, here. Something...different.
Eliana stares, unable to take her eyes from her dead son as he twitches, shudders and then convulses uncontrollably. She stands, rooted to the spot, unable to move her body, though every muscle screams to run to him and cradle his spasm-ridden body. Before her eyes, he throws up one tentacle, then two, then three, until his mouth is full with the thickness of a fungal bloom of cephalopod tendrils. He chokes on them, as she screams, and then tendrils are bursting through all of his skin, ripping it aside in order to be free of the cage of still-mortifying flesh.
She cannot stop screaming.
***
She is still screaming as she awakens, the sound loud in the silence of the Lacrima’s cabin. Debussy no longer plays over the collapsed speaker system, the ship’s silent collision alarm awake and blaring in swift, repeating, red pulses of light that mimic those generated by the entity now raucously beating at the shell of its cage, drifting between her ship and the debris field far beyond. Blood wells and orbs from a deep gash in her forehead, and her vision swims, but suddenly, Eliana understands, watching the tentacled entity beat at the cage.
It is trying to birth, but cannot free itself. And through the haze of her own floating blood, Eliana sees not the trapped tentacled entity, but knows it for what it truly is. Her son has come back to her. He has found her at long last. Tears well in her eyes, but now, after twenty years, finally, she sheds tears of joy. Her son has come back to her.
Eliana sets her jaw, straightens her spine and pushes off the cracked viewport with one steady hand. She floats her way back to the cabin’s pilot seat and settles in as best she can, grabbing for the helmet that dances away from her in the weightless air, everything bathed in the intermingled glaring reds of the struggling entity and the Lacrima’s alarm system. She adjusts the helmet over her head and snaps it shut with a violent twist, her suit filling with refiltered air. She closes her right eye against the sudden rush of properly flowing blood as it courses down her face, filling one half of her vision. Strobe-lit orbs of her blood still speckle the cabin, intermingling with the ever-present sparkle of her globular tears, filling the otherwise-empty space.
With the barest nudge on the control panel, Eliana sets the Lacrima’s impelling engines roaring to life and the battered ship slides forward, gaining momentum as she revs the hulk up to ramming speed. With a look of absolute joy on her face, Eliana sends the Lacrima slamming into the immense, tentacled creature’s egg, shattering it. Sheer portions of the collapsing egg fall away and shear sections of the Lacrima from the main body of the hull, opening parts of the engine room and auxiliary fuel dumps to the void of space. A thick, black, quickly-globuling leak of engine coolant and fuel bleeds out into space as the ship depressurises and portions of the hull begin to crumple inward.
Eliana is thrown forward from her seat by the collision and slams up against the cabin view-port, this time full-bodied. She lingers there, watching the tentacled foetus within the egg breach, its massive tendrils ripping at the collapsing barrier. With each stroke, it reveals itself more fully until it is free.
She watches as her son stretches tendrils to the distant stars, light radiating from its pulsing, burning core. Radiative heat boils off the stellar entity, its external membrane burning a bright, pulsing red. Eliana forces her eyes to stay open as her retinas burn with the brightness of her son’s awesome new form. A swell of pride blooms up within her. His new body will not succumb to the ravages of disease, nor age, nor infirmity. Here, in the limitless black of space, he will live, undying.
For a moment, the tentacled stellar creature swells, drinking in the ambient radioactive energy of the deep black around it. And then it turns its spherical mass upon the wreck of the Lacrima, the ship collapsing in segmented stages, one portion of the hull after another crumpling in like an accordion. Drawn by the bleeding heat and light of the dying ship, and the meager warmth of the entity within, the interstellar entity falls on the crumpling hulk and wraps it in a tentacled embrace.
As the cabin is bathed in burning, pure-red light, the tentacled mass of her newly reborn child crushing up against the already-weakened glass, Eliana exults in her son’s final embrace. Metal crumples and folds in on itself in sharp, swift strokes, pinning her and crushing the breath from her lungs. And as the tentacles scythe through the hull and find purchase on her form and close tight around her, cracking bone and turning muscle to pulp, one thought repeats endlessly in Eliana’s mind.
He has come back to her.
PEOPLE
ARE READING WHAT YOU ARE WRITING
By Luso Mnthali
Luso Mnthali was born in Malawi, grew up in Botswana, went to university in the United States, and now lives in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. Luso hikes in the mountains because it helps her get over her fear of heights.
IN A ROOM ON the top floor, maria typed. And she typed and she typed. After two days, she looked up and saw a man, a short man with a clean-shaven face, standing in front of her. He watched her silently until she looked up, alerted by breathing not her own, when she needed to stretch and yawn at last. On another world, her stamina would have astounded many, but here on the New World, new human feats were always in motion, such that people were constantly re-evaluating what was humanly possible. These humans breathed differently, slept less, did more. They were also capable of retaining more information, and were also able to shut out the world when need be.
***
When maria at last stopped typing, she was not surprised to see him standing, watching her.
“How long have you been there?” she asked him.
“Oh, a couple of days,” he answered. He was face to face with her, as she sat there, at that table, her hands vibrating above the keyboard.
***
“Why are you here?” maria asked him.
“maria without the capital M. You are making them nervous.”
“What do you mean?”
“Punctuation, spelling, all done with a certain…flair, or done differently. Truth and honesty, to the extreme. Killing off characters that we…that we like. Where do you come up with these stories? They’re just stories, are they not? And your new word creation. Why can’t you stick to the approved list? You’re making a lot of important people angry, Maria.”
“No, my name is ‘maria’. Not…not ‘Maria’. Simply…‘maria’.”
Her large, determined, brown eyes did not waver; there was no perspiration on her bald head.
***
The man pursed his lips even more, until the straight line blurred with his features. “maria without the capital M. You are making them nervous.”
With that, he disappeared and she simply continued. She made her spelling “mistakes” when necessary, creating new colours and new words, and new moods to feed a crowd. Soon, her fame spread throughout the land and people wanted to crown her Queen. “Chiphadzua,” they called her. The one who kills the sun with her beauty.
***
She thought and thought about it. How people, even now, after the voyage to the New Planet, insisted on the old languages and ways of doing things. She had all bloods within her, yet people still chose to see her as from the Old Planet. The Old Ways still remained very much a part of their existence. They did not believe that the wars of the past could happen here, that the Old Ways were still very much a part of the New World, on the New Planet. Perhaps her Xhosa ancestor, Maria, for whom she was named, was strongest in her blood. Her Old South African heritage told her of the First People. Maybe this is what the Council feared the most. That the oldest blood was the strongest. Perhaps Mallika of the Iyer in Old India gave her the gall, the necessary courage. Mallika with her long, black hair and big, shining eyes. An intellectual, famed ancestor. And Maita, the Kalanga woman in Old Botswana, asked her to dare and keep on daring. She also knew that Mireille, neither Hutu nor Tutsi, and not fully French, would give her courage, ask her to remember faith and the Old God, and to travel. These were all her ancestors. But somehow, the last country she lived in, Old Malawi, was stated in her bio. She wouldn’t escape that, didn’t want to, but she remembered what it meant.
***
In the Old Ways, women were not free to inherit from their deceased husband’s estate when they became widowed. In the Old Ways, very few women were educated. Those who were educated, sometimes chose not to show how smart they were. Sometimes, they gave up the Freedom education had given them to have families. They bought into what the Council would eventually build—a New World. They gave up fighting for more freedoms, all around the world, for more women. The reasons for this were varied and she wrote about them often. Telling the people, so they would not forget. New Planet agents wanted the people to forget how unequal the society remained. Your bloods and your past remained with you, were documented in your bio and were used to keep you within a certain level of society. Even though the New Constitution stated that there would be no discrimination based on nationality, race or country of origin, discrimination in the New World was rampant. But maria was a woman with a past. Her bloods and history marked her as a person ripe for dissent. Her bloods marked her as a rebel, even amongst women in other parts of the New Planet. Women who believed maria was to be saved from herself and follow the ideals they espoused. Therefore, she stayed in her prison, built shortly after she had arrived on the New World, and plotted dissent quietly.
***
The short, bald man with dull eyes and hardly any lips visited her again over a few days.
“I hear you will be crowned Queen,” he said to her.
“No, I will be a queen. Just like that girl over there, in the past world, who writes poetry and is still controlled in her tweets. Who does not dance all over the world and all over the place and keeps her face in place. She is unlike me, but she is a queen.” maria stopped the tapping across her keyboard and looked directly into his eyes. He backed away a little.
“Who is this girl you speak of?” he asked her.
“No one,” she said, lying to him in a way he could understand. “No one.” Just like the poor women in her country, she was no one. In a world that liked to stratify, she was no one.
***
And so, she was given a small crown, a small crown for a tall woman with a fierce look in her big, brown eyes. A woman who wore a long, black, sleeveless dress. The only jewellery she wore were small pearl earrings that glowed against her golden-brown skin. These used to be Mireille’s. queen maria wore her small crown of flowers, which were so rare that she wondered where the people had found them. Maybe they grew them away from the Council’s prying eyes. She was told they were called “bougainvillea”, and their cream colour was the rarest variety. She recalled reading about this plant in Maita’s Old Botswana journals.
***
“Queen of what?” The short man appeared again in the dead of night, clearly agitated. His eyes kept darting about, trying to understand how she made contact with the outside world.
“How is it,” he asked, “that you can display such laziness one day, such fortitude and stamina the next, such ill discipline on another day, and still, they love you and crown you queen?”
maria looked up from her work for just a few seconds, but then continued typing as she spoke.
“You give me all the fortitude, all the tools I need to carry on. It is your voice I listen to when I write the character that is a lover. It is your voice that I listen to when I write the character of a ruthless politician or a would-be killer. It is your voice…that drives me. I write about the past so we can all have a future. This is all the Council wants to prevent. A future with a real past. And this is why you are here.”
“You give me no choice, maria, but to pull the plug on you. The Council gave me full powers. It is up to me now.”
“Go ahead. Are you scared of what I will write or what I have already written? You make me more powerful when you try to silence me. In my absence the spectre of what I could have been will lean heavier and become greater than anything I do while I am free. So, go ahead; make this easy for me as queen. I am free.”
“I insist that you issue a statement, asking your followers to respect your privacy and to not commit any acts in your name.”
“And what would those be? Pretending to be me? hing some of my works in a voice they think I would appreciate? Protesting?” maria stretched her long body at the desk, raising her arms so the tips of her fingers reached out to space. The man moved back so her toes would not touch him. She had no hair and, as she twisted her neck to ease
some of her tension, she caught fear reflected in the man’s eyes, the kind of fear you see in a soldier’s prey,”
“Why are you so scared?” she asked him.
“People are reading what you are writing. It does not make sense to let you go on.”
***
That had been yesterday. Or, so her calendar had told her. In a room where true time does not exist, she could never tell. She only told true time by what the planets told her. And the moons, the moons told true time. She rarely looked outside, mostly within. So, for the most part, time did not exist.
***
maria got up. Outside, the blue dawn had risen and the planets were aligning. The man, the muse, the Council representative, he of the short stature and nondescript face, of the unhealthy tint to his skin and the follower’s demeanour, was really going to do this. She knew that those on the inside, those who lived as her followers, those who were her children, past and future subjects, her characters and those she gave birth to, would appreciate her escape. From the tall filter window of the light-yellow room in which she worked, she could see the rest of her world. In the streets below, an army surrounded her tower. They had been there from the day she started to write. The day she took up residence in the six-story, grey-stone tower, with the single flight of stairs, spiralling inside and outside, they had appeared. The sound of their boots was enough to alert her to their presence; otherwise they never made direct contact. Sometimes, she’d catch a few of them looking up at the tower, at its strange construction and its pointed dome, much like the spindle of an old-fashioned sewing wheel. Perhaps she’d dreamed it up from some photographs of Old India that Great-Grandmother Mallika kept for her children. Or, from books that her own mother read to her when she was very young. Some stories about a little, evil creature who kept a king’s daughter imprisoned in a tower. Eventually, she had dreamed up her prison and there she sat. She felt that the Council would never understand her intention and for this she was grateful. Being free—of the Council, of expectation—was something she greatly craved.
Future Lovecraft Page 4