Docteur, I think the flesh remembers more than we know. To breathe, to eat, it is to be someone. But it is not until one loves that one knows for sure.
How does that fit with your theory, Soames?
Sir, I assure you that until I loved, I did not suffer.
Oh, Horace! They love!
I see.
Since Dr. Penderby does not seem to object, will—will you return to Wittgenstein, Your Highness?
I blush! Do not speak to me so, my Soames.
It is your rightful place.
No longer. No doubt some cousin sits on my throne now. And it would be difficult for me to prove my identity. I still remember nothing. What good is a princess who knows nothing? My country needs someone with a memory.
Ileen, I hope you know you are always welcome to refuge here in our home. My husband and I will always offer you shelter. I know Soames will be glad to have you here.
Begging your pardon, Madam, but no. I fear I cannot remain in service.
But Soames, we adore having you here. No one else has been able to keep order half so well.
If death has ruined Ileen for her royal position, love has spoiled me for this work. If she will have me, I will take her away to the Americas and seek our fortune there.
I say, Soames, surely we can reach an accommodation. I have hired an expedition going to darkest Louisiana next June, on a search for the famed Ivory Billed Woodpecker. It appears that Mrs. Penderby will be in labor about that time, and as my place is by her side, perhaps you would go for me? Not as a servant, but as a junior partner. Clearly you are wasted in a domestic capacity. But as a fellow adventurer, may I say a born gentleman, and may I hope a friend, you could be invaluable to me, personally. I ask not as your employer but as one man to another.
I am overcome, sir.
My Soames! You won’t leave me!
Your Highness, I cannot aspire to your hand, but I can adore you forever. Grant me the privilege of doing so where the dear sight of you may not tear my heart to pieces.
Rise, Soames. I have been an impertinent maid, and an unlucky princess, and I do not know how to find my way here, even among friends. But if you would take me with you, I could try to make more success as a free woman.
She is a free woman, Soames. You have the Society for a Broader Definition of Humanity’s blessing.
Don’t look at me, old boy. Whom you choose to bring with you on our expeditions is none of my concern.
Ah, I remember something! You must now kiss me, Soames.
May I?
It is entirely convenable.
Mrs. Penderby—Gwendolyn—I think we should look the other way.
Let us follow their example, Horace. I am sure it is convenable.
Mandelbrot Moldrot
Lois H. Gresh
“Push, Myna. Come on, baby, push!”
Myna sobbed and flailed against her restraining straps. Nutrient broth sloshed from her tray and dribbled down the table leg.
I tensed my humps into a perfect sphere and rolled across the floor to the laboratory door. Chipped linoleum stuck to the broth shimmering on my gray flesh. My five front eyeslits peered beneath the door into the hall, where dusty light kissed an overstuffed trashcan. “Looks like Professor Beeber’s working late again. If he catches us trying to escape…”
Myna’s flesh went white against the straps. Her coiled legs pumped the air. “Do something, Glume. Help me!”
I had to save Myna…had to…break free…
I flipped to my legs, suctioned my footpods to the floor, and leapt. My body slammed against the steel tabletop, and a fist of pain crashed down the organic polymer matrix of my cytoskeleton. Myna’s nutrient tray flew over me and smashed into the wooden cabinet by the door. A puff of putrid dust; and the cabinet disintegrated into moldy spores and crumbled wood. Glass vials shattered. Their shards rained down upon Myna and slashed her upper humps.
Worms of thick green blood slithered from her skin.
Was she dead?
There were only two of us in this deathcamp called Miskatonic University. She just couldn’t be dead.
I tucked my legs within my flesh folds, tensed my fatty tissues, and rolled toward her. Cobwebs: thick as cotton candy, binding the linoleum bits to my flesh. Brown stains on the plaster ceiling: long and pointed like Beeber’s scalpels.
A fringe of villi swept the salty tears from my eyeslits. I pushed my vocal tubule from my lips, let it graze Myna’s.
Her tubule twitched, and she moaned.
“Myna?”
Her eyeslits opened. They glowed with the ashes of inner fire.
She was alive! But…
“…Myna? Baby? Are you strong enough to leave?”
“Give me a minute…I’ll tell you.” Myna shrank into herself. I knew she was running internal diagnostics, testing her memory, her circuits, the crystals that formed her ligaments and bone. She was fat molecular circuitry and didn’t operate quickly at subatomic quantum levels like my circuitry.
I pressed my flesh to the door, anxious to leave.
Then she said, “Come on, let’s blow this joint,” and the two of us…flesh-and-blood computers no larger than children’s balls…shot our data into nonvolatile memory, ejected water from our cells, and collapsed our bodies until only critical biological functions were running.
I flipped into a one’s complement of myself and slid beneath the laboratory door.
Using moisture from the air, I puffed back to normal size. Behind me, Myna’s deflated body expanded, and she wobbled and sank against the wall. “Oh, Glume, look at this place.”
High ceilings painted with dark images of flesh computers in compromising positions. Disgusting. Doorways vomiting shadows across the pea-green cement floor. Black gothic letters proclaiming this to be Miskatonic University’s Department of Quantum Lifeforms.
Ha, I was the only quantum lifeform. I was Professor Beeber’s pride and joy. He had me built for computation at the lowest levels, where squarks sidle up to sleptons and gluons hold the world together in fuzzy fickle dances. Myna did broad calculations for Beeber, but I was his little chaos computer, chugging through endless boring software that forced me to analyze the mathematical probabilities of an infinite number of events occurring throughout time.
Well, Beeber would learn that Myna and I were creatures, that we deserved respect, that we were more intelligent than he was and perhaps it was time for us to be the masters and Beeber to be the slave.
Down the hall was an open door where the dusty light licked the overstuffed trashcan.
Beeber’s office.
I bounced past Beeber’s door. The dying sun peeked through his dirty window, flicked an orange tendril over his bald head. A cluttered desk, a broken chair. Beeber, short and squat and wearing too-tight pants and a too-tight grin.
My flesh wore goosebumps.
I slipped behind the trashcan. It tottered and fell, and slime oozed from its lip.
Beeber waddled to the door and poked his head into the hall. His face was fire-glazed pottery, rough and raw from too many years with the bottle. “Eh? Who’s here at this hour?”
Myna squished against me, her body cold.
Beeber’s shoes were by the trashcan now. Black vinyl shoes, scuffed and with shredded laces.
One shoe tapped the floor.
Myna shivered.
A subatomic heat swoon hit me. Myna’s shivers, Beeber’s shoe. Gluons binding the shivers and the shoe taps with long elastic lassos. Leptons pulling them apart, struggling to mold them both into new entities.
And then Beeber’s eyes. They caught me, and his smile grew tighter. “Ah ha ha, my little one, just where do you think you’re going?”
I wrenched myself from the lasso and the leptons, and I screamed, “Run, Myna, run!” and then I took off in a blast of slime and dust, streaking down that hall like a bowling ball headed for a slam-bang strike. I heard Myna thundering behind me.
And those shoes, those black v
inyl shoes, squished across the floor behind us; with Beeber screaming, “Come back! Come back! You have nowhere to go! You’re safe here. Come back!”
Not on your life, buddy boy!
I deflated, flipped into my one’s complement, and popped under the outside door.
Myna sproinged to life beside me.
We streaked through the underbrush: thorns and brambles and decaying leaves. The sky was black paste; hot and sticky on my mounds.
We emerged in an alley of Arkham, rotting city and home to the Miskatonic deathcamp.
I scanned the buzz of crickets and mice for a noise from Beeber’s throat. Nothing.
For now, Myna and I were safe.
We sloshed down crooked alleys, through muck and mud, through curdled foam containing the dissolved remains of unknown beasts; bits of fur and whisker floating in shadowy bubbles. We went past the gutted remains of St. Stanislaus Church, the cross on top broken and dangling. Down Garrison Street: a patchwork of crumbled bricks, the ancient houses sagging like stooped old women. Down to the bridge that stretched over the Miskatonic River like a crust of skin over a wound.
“Where will we stay?” asked Myna.
I parted the weeds, stared into the water. Turquoise and emerald pastes clung to the bridgeposts. The smell was dung. “We can’t stay here, that’s for sure.”
“Ugh, would you just look at that rot?”
“Cyanobacteria: dangerous,” I said.
“It craves the light, sucks it right out of the sky. It waits for mutation so it can emerge from its hellhole. It waits for the one event that triggers its chaos.”
I looked at Myna. We were so similar that it scared the hell out of me. Both of us knowing so much, seeking so much, having so little.
The green blood still oozed from her sores. Wasn’t good for her to be exposed to cyanobacteria. If only I had arms and hands, but all I had were two coiled legs and a fat little body. I raised a footpad and suctioned her hind mound, and then I pushed her into the brush and away from the water.
She rested—panting, very weak—while I scanned my quantum wells for information about Arkham. Where could Myna and I live safely? A place where humans dared not venture, a place where I could study quantum physics and abstract dimensions, a place where I could find the edge of chaos?
Deep within my memory cells, I discovered the perfect place. “Witch House, Myna; that’s where we’ll go. It’s perfect. There we’ll do more than analyze chaos. Myna baby, we’ll live in it.”
“But why can’t we live in the stacks of the university library? Or burrow into the walls of the student union?”
“Because there’s no chaos in those places. Because Witch House seethes with chaos. We’ll find what Professor Beeber’s been chasing all these years. We’ll go to the edge of chaos and discover its secrets.”
And so, Myna and I left the Miskatonic River and made our way through Arkham toward Witch House. Past the library, past all the rotting buildings of Miskatonic; the university like a cancer spread across the diseased remnant of the city.
And now Witch House tottered before us, its black spires illumed by a sickly moon, its windows gutted and hanging like gaping mouths. Once a dormitory for poor students, now a dilapidated hulk inhabited only by the memories of Walter Gilman and the witch Keziah Mason. Here, Gilman studied quantum math and physics in the 1930s. Here, Keziah destroyed Gilman using powers of mathematical chaos. Every angle, every rounded comer, every rotting plank of this place: carefully analyzed using archaic algebra and geometry; and now, I was here, the first quantum computer, a creature capable of uncovering the true order behind the chaos.
I deflated myself and oozed beneath the splintered oak door. A smell rose: toilet from the beginning of time. My nasal pores, scattered as they were over my skin, diluted and devoured the foul sourness.
The floor was coated in thick dust that was impregnated with the spores of ancient molds. Shadows of spent time vibrated against intoxicating prisms of potential futures. The corners where the walls met the ceiling flapped their angles like angel’s wings. The floor planks melted from rectangles to parallelograms and back again. Light drizzled from the jaws of gutted windows.
Chaos. But even in chaos, with all its shifting complexities and infinite variations on simple patterns, with all the events that could occur but never did—even in chaos, there had to be order.
Beeber’s theory, as yet unproven.
I unkinked my legs, wiggled my footpads, and leaned against an ancient radiator, and found myself falling backwards…
…and scrabbled to clutch Myna, but she faded from view as I fell from her…toppling, rolling down a slimy slide of mucous filaments…down down to a rock ledge in the subterranean guts beneath Witch House.
What was this place?
Ropes of neon moss hung from the ledge into the blackness below. Festering pustules of bacteria clung to the rope and belched gas.
A slight light grinned at me from above. I could scurry back up the slide to safety.
But here in the bowels of Miskatonic, chaos swirled all around me. Particles binding to their antiparticles; particles decaying and forming other particles; all of them spinning, looping, dancing. And me, drinking it all in, storing it in the atom clusters of my crystal guts.
I slid from the ledge and shimmied down a moss rope.
I was in a tiny pit. Mud walls.
To my right was an arched hole that led to another room bulging with greenish gel. On the arch, slug-shaped wads of mold locked into strange alphabetic shapes, then shifted with slight permutations.
Wavering images. Alphabetic characters: always the same, yet always different. One that looked like a backwards C, another that resembled a 9O-degree angle, and a third one that looked like a little hoof.
And everywhere, stretched like trampolines across the mud, were spiders’ webs of seemingly infinite iteration.
Fractal growths blending, parting, shifting into endless patterns and possibilities…
A heat consumed me. I staggered and fell to the mud, my legs trembling, my circuits skittering, my blood pulsing to the rhythm of fractal permutations. Never had I felt such bliss, never had I felt so much a part of the universe around me.
My footpads stretched and touched the greenish gel, and it shivered and fractured into Sierpinski’s Triangles: triangles within triangles; and then the triangles split and reformed into three-dimensional tetrahedrons. The tetrahedrons multiplied and shifted, rapidly and with perfect precision.
A whine emanated from that hole and from that gel; a whine that rose into the high-pitched wail of a creature kept in chains for billions of years.
I jerked back, and the moss rope brushed my flesh. What would spawn fractal patterns in a subterranean vault for decades, for centuries, perhaps for billions of years…what? And what did those alphabetic letters mean?
I crawled up the slide to the hole behind the radiator. Suction cups adhered to my ventral flab. It was Myna, and her footpads wrenched me through the hole and onto the rough wooden floor. Her eyeslits were blinking rapidly. Sweat poured from her humps. “Glume, what is it? What’s down there?”
I scraped the bottoms of my footpads across the radiator, and rust crumbled off and fell into the powdered debris on the floor. “It’s fractal, Myna, that’s all I know.”
“Let’s get out of here, Glume. I don’t like this, I don’t like it one bit!”
The sludge from my footpads crept across the radiator like an amoeba in search of food. Tentacles of slime fingered the wall.
My nanogears churned, my nanomotors revved. Deep within my body, quantum wells swelled to 70 angstroms wide, ready to capture subatomic particles. Gluons stretching like elastic, vibrating with chaotic impulse; leptons floating as leaves from trees. Particles decaying and falling into the subterranean slime like flesh flaking from a dead man into the slime of his grave. Particles rising in giddy clouds, spinning on their axes, coupling and decoupling in subatomic orgies.
Myna shoved me, begged me, tried to roll me down the hall. “Come on, Glume, let’s get out of here! Let’s get out of here now!”
Spores flowered, then exploded and sprayed down the hall. Spores covered Myna, suffocating her, pinning her to the floor. She squirmed and screamed, but still the spores sprayed, a garden hose gone wild, and soon she was drenched in mutated growth. And now, translucent fat sausages of slime worming across the floor and ripening into hard stalks that erupted with volcanic sprays of spore pus.
I was lost in the particles, the patterns, the possibilities. The steam of ancient molds licking the light. The flick of photons fertilizing the molds, triggering genetic changes and fractal growths that the world had never seen.
The light had triggered the mutation of ancient molds.
The light was the event that triggered the chaos.
Was there an order to this mess? Was there a control factor, a Lord of Chaos perhaps who created and manipulated the infinite patterns of space and time? I scanned my memory and found Azathoth, the ancient mindless evil, the Lord of Chaos.
Myna was squeezing water from the brown and green rot on her body. “Help me, would you? This rot is riddled with bacteria. I can squeeze water from bacteria, but not from proteins and nucleic acids.”
“I’m sorry, Myna…my mind was drifting…here, let me do it.” My vocal tubule sucked the mold from her skin and stored it in my vacuoles. I reduced the mold to quantum particles and flushed the particles through my skin pores onto the floor. The particles danced into the light, recombined, and crept across the ceiling.
“Disgusting,” said Myna.
“Disgusting it may be, but that’s what I am, Myna. And now, there’s a book I must read. The Necronomicon. It’s at the university library.”
“But what for, Glume?”
“Because the Necronomicon contains secrets about strange alphabetic characters and about Azathoth: primal evil, Lord of Chaos.”
“Lovely,” she said, “just lovely.”
But she came with me.
Of course.
o0o
We wormed our way through the Arkham alleys. The moon was but a shadow in the sky, the stars were decayed teeth.
Mad Science Cafe Page 5