Future Lovecraft

by Anthony Boulanger

  She watched the pictures on the TV monitor and saw what Gyorgi meant. When they turned away from the mountain they were to explore, she could see the far crater wall, brilliant in sunlight, and the L.M. itself, where it sat on its landing struts, half-lit, half-shadowed.

  But back toward the mountain, the strange, jagged peak that, so the scientists said, could only mean that Tsiolkovsky itself was an impact crater—and what an impact, the scar it left nearly three times as wide as the Earthside’s most prominent feature, Tycho!—back that way, all that the cameras could pick up was darkness.

  She looked through Gyorgi’s eyes....

  Darkness. A jumble. Shadow and darkness—the realm of Chernobog. And yet, in the darkness, this side of the mountain, what looked like small hillocks, yet pointed and craggy.

  “The central peak’s children?” she whispered, half to herself. Realising, of course, that even if she were trying to contact him, Gyorgi, outside the L.M., couldn’t hear her.

  She watched as if through his eyes, as if her sight, too, were confined by his helmet as he and the others peered into the darkness.

  The hills were still far away from the L.M. and the men wouldn’t go to them until the next morning—Earth morning, that was, after they’d had another sleep period. Yet, they did look a little like gravestones.

  Huge, sharp gravestones, patterned in rows. And between them—did she see what Gyorgi really saw?—what could almost be mist if the moon had an atmosphere.

  Shadow and darkness. Her thoughts went back once more to that evening in Baykonur, when all her inquiries about Gyorgi had turned up nothing. She’d lain in bed in her room that night, claiming she felt ill, and tried to concentrate on Gyorgi.

  She thought of the Sun and the Moon and their mythic love—the cause of the seasons. Dazhbog and Myesyats. Thought of their quarrels that, so the myths claimed, also gave birth to earthquakes. Dazhbog’s abandonment of his Moon-Bride every winter, but—here, she concentrated the hardest—his coming back each spring. And....

  She joked about it afterward, saying it must have been the special sensitivity of her Russian woman’s soul. Or perhaps just stress. But she had seen it.

  ...the vision...

  ...white walls. An accident ward in a rural hospital outside of Baykonur, where Gyorgi had crashed his motorcycle. The doctors had not yet informed the officials—or, rather, as her vision widened, she realised they had told the Cosmodrome’s commandant, but, although she’d asked, he had not told her.

  The shadow. The brightness. The earlier myths of primeval Man, of evil and goodness. Chernobog and Byelobog, gods of the Dark and Light. Light of truth, withheld even when she had asked....

  Gyorgi had come back the following morning, little the worse for wear. And, of course, what she thought she had seen could have been a coincidence—she knew he drove too fast. She had even argued with him about it. But in the meantime, she’d made two decisions. The first was to officially ask for a transfer to the cosmonaut program, to become a cosmonaut-in-training. This, she knew, was what Gyorgi had wanted, but up to this moment, she had always held back.

  And the other, when Gyorgi was better, was to insist that they get married.

  ***

  She lay on her couch, remembering now, while, on the moon’s far side, Gyorgi was sleeping. She had read the Western myths. Fantasy. Science fiction. Books she had purchased to read, alone, in the Florida nights while Gyorgi had been away on training.

  She knew about training, and nights spent alone, even after her and Gyorgi’s marriage. Even though, by then, she was a cosmonaut, too, “to follow in the footsteps of Tereshkova,” as her husband had put it to those in command, there still was no question of her being actually sent into space, herself. Even Valentina Tereshkova had been a symbol, making that one flight in 1963, but, as a woman, thereafter perpetually grounded—so, too, her own job had continued to be primarily that of a mechanic.

  But then the Soviet Union collapsed and they’d moved again, first to Luga, where her family came from—here, she could find work, whereas he was idle—and then to America, as a package with the great Energia rockets that NASA had bought from the Russian Republic, to help in the rebirth of its Moon program.

  And while Gyorgi learned the ins and outs of American space capsules, Tasha had read Western authors and wondered. She’d wondered at all the authors’ obsessions with reaching the Moon. For all, it seemed the ultimate mystery, especially its dark side. And even, for some, it seemed also the key to a deeper mystery.

  The Russian myths, before the Sun and Moon, spoke of gods of light and shadow. Of Byelobog and Chernobog. She wondered if Lovecraft had known the Russian myths—

  Why had she thought of H.P. Lovecraft? Rather than Verne or Poe or the others?—yet, surely he had known, if not directly, as surely they all had. His vision sharper, perhaps, in some respects, just as the others’ was sharper in others. It was her belief that all human thought was ultimately based on identical truth, on some all-but-forgotten memory of Mankind.

  Yet, the myths were, at base, simply metaphor. The evil of shadow was surely Man’s evil. That she believed, too. Just as the Energia rocket was her metaphor-child—she and Gyorgi had proved unable to have their own children, despite the myth-union of Dazhbog and Myesyats spawning the stars. But she’d helped assemble the Energia on its new American launchpad, so Gyorgi could ride it, and then, when Captain Brechner came down with the flu and she was assigned to the C.M. in his place, they both could ride it....

  The ship to the Moon’s far side—through its darkness. Opening mysteries to reach to the stars beyond, past the planets, stars shrouded, yet burning bright in their own darkness. The children of Sun and Moon.

  God and Goddess, one in the other.

  ***

  Tasha dreamed of the moon and stars, her mind metaphorically one with Gyorgi’s. It was while she slept in that way that she often felt she understood the most.

  Tasha dreamed of the following morning—no need for TV, now—as the L.M. opened and three men dismounted, bulky in spacesuits. She walked with the first of them into the shadows.

  She saw the balloon first, the one Poe had dreamed of in his chronicle of the Hollander-Cosmonaut, Hans Pfaall. She saw its bent hoop, its tangled netting, its bag-covered gondola—more than even her husband could see because her eyes were clearer. She saw the projectile that Jules Verne envisioned, fired from the giant columbiad cannon, which, even if it had not achieved touchdown, still lay on its side in the shadow before her.

  She saw other shapes, too, arrayed in long rows. Rows that converged on the central mountain. A bicycle-like frame, surrounded by skeletons of long-dead geese; another, surrounded by metal spheres. The V2-like slimness of Robert Heinlein’s and Willy Ley’s coupled dream, made into cinematic flesh in a film she’d seen once when she was a child, Destination Moon. And yet other shapes, too, saucer-like nightmares, the visions of men like Jessup and Scully that lay, side by side, with truly non-human dreams. Shapes to fit truly non-human proportions....

  She blinked.

  ... and yet, all dead. The ships crushed and broken....

  She heard Gyorgi thinking:

  ...Let us put bones, then. This plain would be nothing but an immense cemetery, on which would repose the mortal remains of thousands of extinct generations....

  She woke. Yes, a graveyard. A graveyard of spaceships. The words were not Gyorgi’s, though, but—she thought back—those of Michel Arden. The French adventurer in Jules Verne’s novel.

  She blinked. On Earth, in Houston, the Sun would have just gone down—she’d slept the whole day through. Far to the west, the Moon would be setting, too; this time, she wouldn’t see even a sliver.

  The TV monitor was still on, the equipment functioning automatically. She heard its static. She sat up to look at it, seeing the images, shadowy, fleck-filled.

  “...Tomorrow, we’ll rig lights that we can take with us,” her husband was saying. NASA was gentle, unlike the Cosm
onaut Corps of her own nation—first, they must have rest. “Those, with the portable camera we have now, may give more information on those oddly shaped rocks we’ve found.” Then, he had not seen.

  She sank back to the couch as he gave his description. A cemetery, yes, laid in rows, but still only stone and dust.

  Only she saw what was buried beneath it.

  ***

  Gyorgi! she screamed—knowing he couldn’t hear her, not outside—watching her husband step from the L.M. the final time. Half-dreaming, half waking-in front of the monitor, she waited as the three astronauts, in blazing light now, walked through the ships’ graveyard, her own spacecraft having swung back around the Moon too late to do anything more than just watch them. She saw, with her vision, the L.M. itself, in the line of corpses. The crushing of Men’s dreams.

  But Gyorgi could not see.

  During the night, she’d recalled, in her mind’s eye, those last days before the launch. Her husband’s arguments with NASA that not only had she had cosmonaut experience—something of an exaggeration, at best—but also that, as a woman, with a woman’s patience and natural steadiness, her presence in orbit around the Moon would impart a steadfastness in those that were on its surface. But he had been wrong. She did not have patience. Not for the sort of waiting she did now, wanting to see, straining to see, what, even with the aid of their cameras, her husband could at best describe only dimly.

  Except....

  Except that she did see. The loneliness and stress produced visions in her mind. She’d looked to her instruments first, of course, the “Christmas tree” panel lights all still glowing green, just in case it might be some bad mix of air. She’d checked and re-checked again, thinking at one point she might call NASA to ask their opinion, but, no, she had best not—why cause needless worries? It was only the loneliness, after all, that and the fitfulness of her sleep habits, despite the schedule of sleep-times NASA had asked her to follow.

  But how could she have slept otherwise, now that Gyorgi and the others were on the Moon’s surface?

  And so, the visions came, these from the books she had hoarded that autumn. The dreams of a Heinlein, naive and hope-filled, mixed with the more cautious, Gallic optimism of Verne. And the darker, although still ambiguous, visions of Wells and Poe—Poe, with his bleakness, his soul-searing horror, still having his astronaut dream, too, of fields of Selenite poppies. Of lakes and forests.

  But, then, Lovecraft’s colours. His dreams of far Yuggoth. Her own dreams, no less terrible for their having been lived once, of Hitler and Stalin, of KGB horrors. Poe, at his worst, still foresaw some brightness, some faint trace of Byelobog. While the other, his fellow American prophet of darkness....

  She didn’t complete the thought. Something was happening. Lights played on rock spires—spaceships as she saw, but still looking stonelike to the others. And now behind them, as they climbed the talus of Tsiolkovsky’s mountain.

  “Over here, quickly!” The voice was not Gyorgi’s. Rather, the Frenchman’s, also with an accent. She watched as the camera panned, saw his lights sparkle. And then...deeper darkness.

  “I don’t know, Gyorgi.” The voices crackled. “What do you think, then?”

  “A cavern of some sort.”

  No, Gyorgi! she thought. But he could not hear her. Nor could she call down to the L.M. to warn them, because there was no one inside to receive the call, and their suit radios were designed only for communications between one another.

  And so, she could only watch as they entered. Half-seeing, half-dreaming—was it a cave mouth? Some huge sort of airlock?

  She still heard their voices, that much of her still tracking them on the monitor.

  “Sloping down....”

  “Smooth-floored. Almost circular in its cross-section....”

  “Almost—what do you think?”

  “Almost as if it were artificial.... “

  She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening, while, at the same time, she still stared at the TV. The sudden swirling beneath the men’s feet, as if their descent took them into a mist....

  “Some kind of gas, maybe. Do you know what this means?”

  “That the Moon has an atmosphere of sorts. But so thin, so tenuous that it exists only beneath the surface. Look, you go out—check the wire antenna. Make sure we’re still broadcasting up to the C.M. Then bring back a container of some sort for a sample.”

  She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening. She saw a huge comet, and yet, not a comet. A spaceship itself, crashing into the Moon.

  Blasting a crater two hundred and more kilometers wide—the aftershock throwing up its central mountain. The occupant, wounded....

  Byelobog shattered. Dead. Chernobog crawling out, once the Moon’s floor had cooled, finding a cleft in the newly formed mountain. A hole to bore into. To bide its time ...hiding.

  And on the TV screen, the mist coalescing. Shadowy, whirling.

  Forming tendrils.

  The vision of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. A hollow stone turning, revealing metal. Tentacles reaching out. Except....

  Except, much vaster.

  Edgar Allan Poe’s horrors most stern and most appalling, yet vaster and darker still.

  What she saw now, her mind’s grasp expanding....

  To bide its time from the time the Moon was young, over the eons, until it was stronger. And while it was waiting, to draw others to it.

  The children, perhaps, of spores it had scattered on its mad journey—some, even, that came to Earth—to draw their strength back into its own body.

  And, even it, perhaps the smallest of entities....

  Coalescing. She saw. In her dream, she tried to send—somehow—some warning to Gyorgi.

  That something stared back at her.

  Knowing. Not knowing. The myths were metaphors. Human and nonhuman, all of the same spawn. Dazhbog and Myesyats. Byelobog. Chernobog. All of them part of the same dark evil....

  ***

  Tasha woke, crying, to NASA’s frantic calls via the Space Station, demanding to know why she had stopped transmitting. Outside, she could see the Earth, bathed in full sunlight. Yet, cold and colourless.

  On the TV, static. There was no picture.

  She closed her eyes, straining. Trying to dream again. Trying to find some trace of her husband.

  Then, slowly, she sat up and straightened her clothing and opened the C.M.’s own, separate transmission link, wondering, as she did, what exact words she could use to tell NASA.

  ***

  There would be no springtime.

  TRAJECTORY OF A CURSED SPIRIT

  By Meddy Ligner

  Meddy Ligner was born in 1974, in Bressuire, a small town in the western part of France. He spent his first 18 years there. He goes back frequently to see his family and to play baseball with the famous Garocheurs. He studied history. Afterward, he taught French abroad: in Finland, Russia and China. Since 2003, he has worked as a teacher of history and geography in Poitiers (France) where he is living with his wife, daughter and son. His website is: http://meddyligner.blogspot.com.

  War and Punishment

  THEY WOULD FINALLY land. Expected and feared at the same time, the end of the voyage was very close. Surrounded by his companions in misfortune, who, like him, were backed to the metal wall, Maxim Brahms scratched at length his salt-and-pepper beard and reflected on the past.

  He remembered the war that he had led in the course of these last few years. A war implacable, without mercy. A crusade against those who were called “the enemies of the people”. A devoted servant of the regime, he had fought the plotters, spies, saboteurs, and other counterrevolutionaries of every kind. In the course of this ferocious battle, Brahms had jailed them with a vengeance, separating whole families, deporting innocents, and obeying orders with zeal. For nothing. Or rather, to end up here, as one of the damned. He nearly retched.

  Like so many others before him, he had ended up engulfed by yet another purge. His Party card,
his advantageous position in the apparatus of the State, had done him no good. When they came to find him in his apartment, cozy in the middle of the night, Maxim had understood. The swine. He had barely time to kiss his wife and his son. Natasha and Alex, what are you doing right now? By the time he was brought to an unknown prison, he realised that he had seen them for the last time.

  They accused him of deviation. Confessions obtained under torture. His trial was even more expeditious. He didn’t know why, but he’d escaped summary execution and was condemned to deportation in perpetuity. On Mars. But is that better than death? For a long time now, Siberia had gone out of fashion. That region, which had become a zone for the privileged population, had given way to another hell: the Marslag. The final step for those who disrupted. The asshole from which one never returned. Mars the Pitiless.

  To reach this charming corner, the prisoners had to pass two months in the interior of a rotten cabin in the vessel October: a ruined engine that, for three decades, had watered insatiable Mars with new detainees. These miserable ones were stuck there, penned like cattle, packed like sardines, for the long and punishing voyage across the cosmos. They had become damned souls, errant spirits, empty of their human substance. In coming here, we have won a one-way ticket to the abyss.

  With a terrible din, the October finally landed on the Martian soil.

  Their chains were connected at the feet, as in the time of the tsars. The prison guards barked, violently pushing the slower prisoners. The aggressiveness oozed from every pore of their skins. Cudgels rained down. The guards drove the procession of phantoms to the exit of the spacecraft. With each step, his irons cut his foot, but Maxim said nothing. He knew that it was useless to complain. They were brought along an immense corridor with immaculate walls, connecting the October to the Martian base. Their metal chains rattling, the convicts trudged along the vast corridor. At the mid-point, they passed under a huge, red banner, on which stood out letters of gold: