Future Lovecraft

by Anthony Boulanger

  Three days later, we received a hail from an approaching spacecraft. It belonged to Sally Nguyen, an independent sutler we’d done business with before.

  I don’t know why I didn’t follow my initial urge to order her to pass us by. At least I won’t have long to regret my decision to tell her to note our new satellite when laying in her approach.

  We welcomed her with the traditional bread and salt. I was as happy as my pod-brothers to see a new face. Although we could’ve traded and sent her on her way, none of us wanted to lose the opportunity to socialise.

  Over vodka, we talked and, as it loosened our tongues, the conversation turned to our unwelcome companion. Sally had done her own analysis of the satellite asteroid during her approach and believed its peculiarities indicated the presence of valuable materials. However, by her people’s law, it became our property when our asteroid’s gravity captured it and she could not explore it, except as our business partner.

  The vodka had clouded our judgement, as well, for we agreed without a second thought. We spent the next two hours planning our venture before turning in to sleep off our drunk.

  The next day, we ate a hasty breakfast before suiting up and piling into Sally’s ship. Our asteroid’s escape velocity is so low that a layer of padding on an empty cargo hold sufficed for acceleration couches. It actually took longer to lay in the course and get our launch window than to make the trip, since the satellite asteroid’s orbit fluctuated in response to Urtukansk’s local mass variations.

  As we landed, and I got a better view of that leprous-yellow surface, I regretted the previous day’s bravado. But I squelched the urge to bail. I was not going to look weak in front of my pod-brothers, much less an outsider. So, I put on my brave face and led the way.

  Stepping onto the asteroid, I noted the crumbly texture of the surface stratum. It resembled rock exposed to high levels of radiant energy, but with a tendency to clump together, which suggested a strong static charge. However, electrostatic measurements proved negative, leaving us to speculate what unknown force might produce such an effect.

  When we reached a safe distance from the spacecraft, we set to work digging that yellow matter that grew spongier the deeper our hole became. All my misgivings returned in force, and I was just ready to call everything off, when the robot excavator teetered, then tumbled through an unseen opening.

  Alyosha scrambled down the slope, sending dust spraying in all directions. As he approached the place where the digger had disappeared, his whole body went limp. In the tiny asteroid’s gravity, his fall looked more like a bit of paper fluttering to rest, but I knew something had gone very wrong.

  So had Volodya. He and Alyosha were always close, although not enough to unbalance our pod’s brother-bond.

  Before I could caution him, Volodya scrambled down the slope. He got within a meter or two of Alyosha before he, too, went limp and fell.

  Even as I struggled to make sense of what I’d seen, Sally brought a tool from her ship—an extensible pole with a grip-claw at the end. Its internal structure kept it rigid, even when fully extended and, with our help, she pulled both our stricken brothers back to the edge of the pit. I knew the worst when I saw the darkened life-support telltales on their helmets, but my heart could not yet encompass it.

  Sally’s shipboard autodoc was smaller than our habitat’s medlab but more sophisticated. Still, it could offer no aid, only information—neither Alyosha nor Volodya had died from life-support failure. Instead, the cellular mechanisms of their bodies had shut down in the same moment as the electronics of their spacesuits.

  At that point, I knew we had no business continuing to explore. “Let’s get off this rock and leave it to somebody with the equipment....”

  Before I could h, the deck set to vibrating. All of us hurried to the nearest viewport.

  The scabrous surface of that damnable asteroid bulged upward, as if a balloon were expanding just beneath it. Cracks formed at the highest point and spread across the bulge. Dust and debris rose, flung out with such force that they struck the spaceship’s hull, hard enough to make it ring like a bell.

  I shouted for Sally to get us out of there, even as the whole ship lurched. In so little gravity, we went tumbling in all directions and, by the time we found handholds, even that gravity had gone. The violence of the eruption had thrown us back into space and freefall.

  But only for a moment before the engines fired, this time a jolt strong enough to make me wish for proper acceleration couches. Improperly restrained objects pelted us as they fell.

  Weightlessness returned and we pulled ourselves to the viewport. It took some seconds that stretched to subjective eternity for the relative motion of the three bodies in our micro-system to bring the damnable asteroid into view.

  Our makeshift mine had become a maelstrom of dust, so thick it obscured the landforms around it. From within came a pallid glow reminiscent of certain growths that invade a habitat’s waste-reclamation system. It aroused a profound sense of revulsion, which I forced down in my determination to see what had just killed two of my pod-brothers.

  Even now, I cannot describe the shape which emerged from that dust cloud. I had the impression of a great bulk, yet of a putty-like flexibility possible only in a microgravity environment. From it extended translucent surfaces of improbable size and thinness, fluttering as if on some cosmic aether from those tales that predate even the semi-legendary First Age of Space.

  A touch on my shoulder pulled me free of that thing’s grip on my mind. I turned to find Sally waiting just behind the window.

  “I’ve put the ship onto a parabolic trajectory that should buy us enough time for the computer to work out a solution for an inhabited asteroid.”

  My mind was still befuddled enough that it took a moment to understand. Asteroid miners don’t work with orbital mechanics on a regular basis, so we don’t think about how individual asteroids’ orbits around the Sun make for constantly changing positions in relation to one another. The haste of our escape would have made matters worse, because the computer would first have to derive our new location.

  On the other hand, our course had removed the damnable asteroid and its hideous inhabitant from our line of sight. One by one, my pod-brothers came out of the trance that monster had put them under.

  Before I could answer their questions, an alarm began to whoop. Sally punched a button on a nearby terminal. As she read the data it displayed, her expression hardened.

  “There’s a problem with the computer. It can’t resolve a course anywhere and it’s starting to degrade performance on other systems.”

  I asked her what other options we had.

  “No good ones. I can aim for an asteroid that’s transmitting, and hope I’ve got our trajectory right and don’t send us on a slow orbit to nowhere. Or I can return to Urtukansk on visual and we can try to fight—”

  More alarms went off. Life-support telltales went yellow and red. We re-sealed our spacesuits.

  “I think that decision’s been made for us.” I gestured for my pod-brothers to brace for the necessary manoeuvers.

  Throughout the series of thruster firings, I waited for disaster. When we landed and gravity resumed its pull, it took a moment to believe we had returned safely to Asteroid Urtukansk.

  Or not-so-safely, I realized, as we exited Sally’s spaceship, just in time for Urtukansk’s companion to rise over a horizon all-too-close. Except it was no longer a solid mass but a cloud of fragments that continued in the same orbit as their parent body. Within it rippled the eye-twisting form of the monster that had killed two of my pod-brothers.

  A panicky voice came onto the suit-radio circuit. “It’s coming after us!”

  Before I could calm my pod-brother, Sally came on. “I’m taking the ship back up and trying to distract that thing long enough for you guys to blow your breeder reactor.”

  There was no time to argue the wisdom of that plan. At least the task of running across an asteroid’s surf
ace, without launching ourselves into orbit, kept our attention on the ground.

  We were within a dozen meters of the reactor complex when Mirosha shrieked, “It’s got her!”

  Behind us, a light flashed, casting our shadows in sharp relief on the rocks. I squelched the urge to turn and see what had happened. Sally had bought our chance and we mustn’t waste it.

  Only at the airlock for the reactor complex did I pause. I pushed three of our surviving pod-brothers safely in, but even as I reached for poor, lagging Mirosha, the writhing mass overhead extended a tentacle that wrapped like a sinuous rope around his waist and lifted his feet right off the surface.

  His shrieks of terror over the suit-radio circuit made my ears hurt, but there was nothing I could do for him. I shut the airlock behind me and hit the controls to cycle us in. When the screaming stopped, we knew Mirosha had met the same fate as Alyosha and Volodya.

  Once inside, we hurried to disable the safety systems. All the time, we could hear that thing clawing overhead, trying to break in.

  We had just shut down the coolant pumps when the roof gave way over the reactor. Atmosphere vented into space and, with it, everything not fastened down. I hit the buttons to withdraw all the control rods from the reactor.

  The explosion threw me against the wall so hard I thought sure it would break the faceplate of my helmet. A flash of light filled the area and in that moment, I saw the hideous thing torn apart, reduced to a dust of ash so fine even photons would scatter it to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

  Although the control room shielding did protect me, I still took a lethal dose of radiation. It just bought me enough time to transmit this account before my body fails altogether.

  Now you must see that my warning gets to every mining outpost in the Asteroid Belt. There are things undreamed-of by our science, that can lie encysted for so many millions of years that the accretion of space dust upon them can form an asteroid around them. And when disturbed, can reawaken to a life inimical to our very existence—

  [Choking sounds, followed by an open carrier for 15 minutes]

  MYRISTICA FRAGRANS

  By E. Catherine Tobler

  E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado—strange how that works out. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Sci Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. For more, visit www.ecatherine.com.

  ABENI BABA WAS accustomed to things falling apart in her hands: grains from distant worlds, the dead in autopsy, her marriage. As iyaloja of Aphelion Station, she found that things fell apart less than they once had, yet still, these corridors with their people and goods could surprise her, as happened when she took the palm-sized copper pendant from the opened sack of nutmegs. How had it come to contaminate the goods? This was her first thought, being that her purpose was to ensure clean and equal trade among the people; she was Mother of the Market, these traders her children, these goods her grandchildren. And this pendant—

  It was marked with a figure: upward man and downward fish. When her thumb moved over it, the pendant came apart, silent and sure, and Abeni closed her hand around it so that none might see. Her dark eyes lifted to the vendor before her. Bolanle bowed her head, spreading broad hands toward the bounty of nutmegs she had procured this journey. Such goods were worth more than gold on Aphelion, yet Abeni would give them all up for a taste of sunlight once more.

  “You journeyed to...?” Abeni’s voice trailed off, wondering from where these sacks had come. She knelt before them, one hand sliding over the canvas sack, finding it had no mark upon it. In her other hand, the pendant warmed, seemed to send tendrils of sunlight up the length of Abeni’s arm. Her fist tightened.

  Bolanle’s answer didn’t interest Abeni: It was a common trade route, the nearest planet to the Aphelion Station. However, the dark man who emerged from behind Bolanle did interest Abeni. She watched this man, overly tall and thin, peer around Bolanle’s slender bare shoulder, borealis eyes widening as he looked down upon Abeni and the sacks of nutmegs. He reached with one impossibly long arm—Where was the joint for his elbow, for his forearm seemed to reach entirely to his shoulder?—black spindle fingers sliding with a whisper against Abeni’s own, holding a startling coldness that seemed like the very depths of space to her. So, too, his skin: black abyss, like that which stretched around and out from Aphelion.

  “Mother Baba.”

  The dark man dwindled and faded to nothing more than Bolanle’s shadow as she rounded her goods and knelt beside Abeni. Abeni felt the pulse of the thing in her hand and slowly rose, shaking Bolanle off. “It has been a long morning of arrivals,” she said, nodding to the traders who cluttered the docking ring and cargo bays. “And I’ve more to tend.” Her voice snapped and Bolanle withdrew. Abeni took one nutmeg with her and fled Bolanle’s stall without marking the requisite forms to allow her goods full entry to Aphelion. And if Bolanle opened her mouth to cry a protest, Abeni took no notice, so intent was she on leaving the docking ring.

  Aphelion Station spread in five concentric rings, rotating on the edge of known space. Abeni had never been troubled by its motion before, for her work consumed her. But as she hurried away now, she caught sight of the whole and infinite black beyond the arched station windows, and she cried out, as if looking into the face of the shadow man. And then, Aphelion faded.

  Abeni felt the pulse of the thing in her hand and found herself standing in a field of grain. Sun drenched the space and her. Abeni thought she would melt, that her entire body would liquefy and flood the ground beneath her. Her death would feed these grains until they were strong, until they—they whispered against her fingertips as she walked and under her passage, they grew. They changed. These grains, once green, flushed to gold and thickened. These grains, once only knee-high, pressed their roots into the soil and surged upward, until they reached skyward. Abeni lifted a hand, but could no longer touch the grain tips. And these tips, once gold, now burned under a flaring sun, turning black, the charred fragrance falling onto Abeni’s shoulders like snow. The grains closed over her then, pressing her to the dirt, until its darkness filled mouth and nose, until the shadow man snatched a hand out and pulled her into the earth.

  She woke in the depths of the station, humid, fetid air rolling over her sticky skin. Painlessly, one palm had been marked by the pendant, the fish figure curling inward, as if huddled. Abeni sat up, the small pendant gleaming a step away from her nose. It was sealed shut once more, though the nutmeg she had taken was cracked in half, revealing its labyrinthine innards, brown curling through ivory; its sharp scent carried to her, seemed to clear her mind. Abeni rolled herself to sitting, crossing her legs and finally reaching a hand to claim the strange pendant. Moisture coated its case, making it slick within her grip. When she picked up the nutmeg next, it withered in her hand, yet Abeni took it with her as she climbed her way out of the maintenance levels and returned to her private room.

  It was a small room, unassuming, decorated with very little, save small trinkets that merchants brought her. Three books, two miniatures, a dried flower from a riverbank on a planet she would never know. A figure that looked like a blue jellyfish, a small plate with an off-center fish painted upon it, three jars of soil. It was the soil she sought, knowing she needed it—though not knowing why or how. She broke the seal on one jar, releasing a fragrance that seemed like sunlight to her; the air sounded like whispering grains as the lid came away. She stuck her small hand through the mouth of the jar, burying the withered nutmeg in the black soil. After a second thought, she planted the pendant, too.

  Come morning, Abeni returned to the docking ring, wishing to pretend all was normal and well. But she knew she had left her work unhed and unhappy merchants greeted her. Goods lined the pathways, awaiting proper entry to the station. One by one, Abeni worked her way through them, last of all to Bolanle, who sat atop her nutmeg sacks, as she ha
d the whole night through. Abeni made no apologies and none of the merchants were openly hostile. As iyaloja, her methods were beyond scrutiny; she would work as she worked and their goods would only be allowed entry by her word. Bolanle worked at her side in comfortable silence, shifting her approved goods to the pallet so they could be moved into the station proper. When Abeni claimed one sack of nutmegs for herself, Bolanle only looked at her.

  “I have need of these,” Abeni said and Bolanle said nothing, for it was not her place. She considered herself lucky to lose only one sack. Everyone knew that larger tithes had been taken by iyaloja prior to Abeni.

  However, not even Abeni could say why she took the entire sack of nutmegs. She cradled the sack against her side, as she might a child, while she made the last of her daily rounds and checked the following day’s schedule. The sound the nutmegs made within the canvas sack calmed her: click, click, click-click. She pictured their small brown shapes, pressed against each other and her; their veined insides, worms coiling through flour. These things pleased her, but she could not say why. Later, in her room, she would look at the quantity of nutmegs she now possessed, and her meager jars of soil, and she would mourn, not understanding.

  Neither did she understand how, in the depth of night, she came to discover the pendant pressed against her breast. It came away with a puckering sound of sweat, the image of this fishman pressed again into her skin. Soil clung to her, as well, proving that she had truly buried it, but now it was here, with her. Abeni held the pendant between her fingers, stroking the fish until the pendant slid open.

  It was not a locket as she understood lockets; there was no place for a mirror or an image. Inside, there was only yawning blackness, as if the pendant were a portal. When Abeni pressed a finger to the darkness, it was as though her finger went inside a space she could not otherwise see. Her finger did not come out the backside of the pendant as it should have. It was simply gone.