“Get him up,” the captain says. I’m hoisted to my feet, Commander Willis on my left and one of the panel-shifting techs on my right. “Simonson, look at me.”
I look.
He is holding a gun, and it is aimed at my face.
It is a boxy sort of pistol, with a wide aperture not meant for bullets. It looks more like a retailer’s checkout gun, with the scanning lasers that—oh, God, that thing can release my patch!
“NO!” I scream hoarsely. “Weren’t you listening? I’m not who you think I am!”
“Who are you, then?” The scan gun remains trained on my face.
“I’m... I’m...” I struggle to remember. The migraine is back, throbbing behind my right eye. “Wendell Simonson.”
“And whose identity did you use when you cleared the terminal building?”
“Jude Simonson. My brother. My twin brother.” I take a deep breath. “He’s the one you want. It was his ticket.”
“Wendell,” he asks sadly, “what is your twin brother’s full name?”
“Jude... ummm... just Jude. Simonson.”
“Try harder.” The scan gun in his hand doesn’t waver, but the tilde-J rune on his eye patch wriggles like a leech. It hurts my head to look at it, but it also seems to help me think.
“Jude Wendell Simonson.”
“You don’t find it odd that your first name and your brother’s middle name are the same?”
My head throbs, the pain behind my right eye nearly blinding me as I stare at the captain’s tilde-J eye patch. The word migraine comes from the Greek hemi+krania, meaning “half your fucking head,” and this pulsing, pounding agony feels like one of those immortal perverts from Olympus is attempting to sire a hero in my right eye socket.
“You outdid yourself with Simonson, sir. He still believes it. The twin, the hospital, everything.”
“Stow that shit, Willis.” The captain’s attention flicks to my left, and then back to me. “Simonson, we need to put you back together now.” He pulls the trigger. Beams of green light scan back and forth over my face, stabbing my right eye.
I close my eyes and clench my teeth. I can see the laser through my right eyelid, strobing while something mythic continues to violate my right eye socket. I feel the patch over my left eye fall away. Accumulated tears wash down my cheek.
“Sedative,” the captain says. The Greek in my right eye thrusts twice more, and then there is a prick in my left shoulder. A chill races down my arm, vanishing at my fingertips. Then a warmth rushes up my spine, a geyser of hot calm. It swirls into my skull and flushes out the pain, the Olympian craniophile, and the blindness.
I open my eyes and remember.
***
It was a clear afternoon, and with a patch strapped over my left eye I was aligning the edge of a granite tablet, one I’d finished inscribing earlier, with its neighbor. The crane above and behind me bore the weight of the tablet—all I had to do was shift it laterally so the bolts on the back could be slid home and the engraved piece fastened in place.
Easy enough, but with no depth perception it was tricky. I’d picked up the habit shared by many of the other runewrights, rocking my head back and forth like a snake, or maybe an exotic dancer, substituting parallax of motion for stereo vision. As I rocked I felt a sudden looseness, and the strap around my head came undone. Suddenly I was looking at my handiwork with both eyes.
At that moment the assembly locked into place, and something smoke-like snaked down from above and stroked the rune, as if acknowledging that this piece was now right.
I looked up, following the pulsing curve of the translucent tentacle. The patch of sky above Voidheron was full of writhing, insubstantial tendrils, some reaching down to caress the ship, others curling and uncurling, stretching and contracting, as if eager for runes of their own to stroke into final position.
Vertigo. The sky was now a mere arm’s length away, and I could see all of it at once, as if from all sides. There were other shapes out there, great runes of light beyond the undulating mass, and in those shapes I could see Bellevue, and Flagstaff, and Mars. My vision expanded further, and I felt like I could reach out and touch those places. I could taste the grey rains of the Pacific Northwest, the scorching sands of the Arizona desert, and the icy, thin bleakness of the Martian wasteland. The runes were full of stars and places and more, and the foggy, fat tendrils touched them all.
Vertigo. I looked up and out and beyond until I was looking behind me, and then I was falling from my scaffold. My harness jerked me to a stop, upside down over ten meters of empty air. My vision snapped back to normal, and I could see my patch still tumbling the last few meters to the ground. Several people, all wearing eye patches of their own, stared up at me, but none more intently than Commander Willis and Captain Adams.
***
Captain Adams is staring at me now. Just like me and that suspended hull tablet, he is checking my alignment, waiting for me to lock into place. I don’t know what it is he expects to see, or what he thinks I can see, but I bet he doesn’t know about the thing on his head.
I blink a couple of times to make sure it’s there. I can look right at it, but I cannot focus on it. It looks like a crab made out of blurry smoke. I look around the room and several other people have foggy patches on their heads, like oversized hats. I squint, straining to see them clearly, but to no avail. A scream bubbles up inside me, and then a calm rush of sedative pops that bubble with a prick echoing the one in my shoulder. I exhale, and all that remains of the scream is a soft “oh.”
“Both eyes open. Good,” says Captain Adams. “Now let’s charge you up.” He gestures, and Willis pushes me to the right. The tech on my right pulls a bit and then kicks my right foot, positioning it for something. I look down and see that I am standing on the crosspiece of a large rune, large enough that my feet are completely within the inscribed stroke.
I recognize it. It’s the tilde-J thing I drew in chutney on my plate. It’s the path I walked to board the ship. It’s the rune on Adams’s eye patch. The three-meter stem of the J leads to the table, and I’m standing on the tilde bit—the same little slash I walked alone as I boarded the ship with a bag over my head. The smell of my own breath and that sweaty bag come back to me.
Adams steps to the end of the rune, a few meters away, and pulls a tiny scalpel from a sheath at his belt.
“You’ve already given so much,” he begins. “At the very least I can do you this small courtesy.” He holds up the blade. “The blood need not be your own.”
He draws the blade deftly across the tip of his left ring finger, and a few drops of blood well up and fall.
The rune shivers as the blood falls, the marble shifting under my feet. The carving is shallow, no deeper than the grouted gap between bathroom tiles, but I can feel the lip of the etching vibrate against my shoe.
Blood strikes the floor, and the rune freezes in place. A foggy, red glow bursts forth, rushing down the curve towards me, where it becomes almost blindingly bright. I can taste the captain’s blood in my mouth, salty and coppery and nauseatingly delicious. My face flushes with fevered heat, my fingers tingle, and I can feel my pulse in my throat, my chest, and my groin.
The rune dims. Everything goes blurry and then snaps into a sharper focus than before—the room, the table, the walls, and the creatures nobody else seems to see.
The thing on Adams’s head is indeed like a crab, multi-limbed and chitinous, with one of those limbs shoved deep into the captain’s open right eye. It has a face, of sorts, peering out of a gap in the front of the carapace. Wet, black eyes glisten above a patch of writhing tendrils, and I giggle when I imagine them as olives on a bed of very bad linguini.
I look around the room at the other officers and crew. Linguini-faced crabs sit on several heads. Squid-like things with cockroach wings perch upon others. A few have six-legged, spiny monkeys on them.
And everybody has a tentacle, a crab leg, or a monkey fist thrust into their open right eyes.
Nobody seems to notice. The creatures look real, completely solid, not the least bit ghostly, but nobody acts as if they know they’re wearing ugly, alien bugs like hats.
“Simonson?” the captain says. “It’s time to get to work. Are you ready?”
Ready? I was born ready. Isn’t that how the cocksure say it? Except I feel like I’ve just been reborn, with half my head reinstalled, alien power pounding in my chest, and my whole soul awash in chemically induced confidence. I don’t know what they injected me with, but there’s enough of it that if you beat me with a stick I’ll shit pills.
I’m confident enough to start feeling angry about what’s been done.
“Simonson,” the captain says again. He’s using his captain voice, but I’m full of drugs, stars, fresh memories, and disturbing visions, and he’s an ignorant asshole who can’t see the truth. I feel a fire kindling within me, and I clench my fists. Captain Adams has injured, manipulated, and humiliated me, and now he expects me to work for him?
I look past the captain and his crab hat. The tip of a massive, wet tentacle strokes a set of grooves on the stone table. I look up, and the ceiling of the room is a mass of slick, quivering, tangled flesh. Vertigo sweeps over me again, and I can see the runes of the universe. Terra Tenska is up there, and it tastes like freshly turned soil.
Earth is there too, and she tastes like autumn, fallen fruit, and fresh meat. She tastes like the harvest. Except harvest is a family farm sort of word. She tastes like reaping.
“Simonson!” the captain barks at me. I languidly turn back to him. “It is time to navigate. We have twenty-five hundred souls aboard, and they are now in your keeping.”
I roll my tongue around in my mouth. It’s kind of like a tentacle, now that I think about it. Dry, though. My fists are still clenched, and the anger is throbbing hotly in my face.
“How many times, captain?”
He glares at me.
“How many times have you done this?” I ask. “Willis here said you’d outdone yourself, which means you’ve done this before.”
“Four, on previous vessels,” he says. “You’re the fifth, but the first on Voidheron. It’s a new design, safer for everyone.”
“Safer.” I shake my head. “Where are the previous three navigators?” Not here, obviously. Not able to fly the ship. Expendable, single-use tools, there for the protection of everyone else. Like condoms.
“We’re still trying to find a way to shield people from the nastier side effects,” he says, dodging the question. “In your case, we—”
“Shut up.” I draw my fists up into my armpits, breaking Willis’s grip on my left arm and the tech’s grip on my right. I open my hands and shove both of them away from me. “You don’t know a damn thing about the side effects.” I turn to Willis, who has one of the monkey-like monstrosities on her head.
“Did the other navigators say anything about parasites?” I ask, and I reach up to grab the horror by what I assume to be its neck.
I don’t know why I expected to find purchase there. Nobody notices these things crouched on their own, or anybody else’s, heads, so despite how they appear to me, they ought to be insubstantial. But I feel the creature’s throat under my hand. I grip hard and yank.
Willis screams, and her head comes forward and then snaps back as the monkey bug pushes off. A spray of clear fluid erupts from her right eye socket, and then she slumps backwards, hitting the floor in a rapid series of limp thumps.
“Did the other navigators see anything besides the runes and the stars? Did they smell the ripeness of Earth, or the hunger of what lives in the void?” I am strangling the thrashing, six-legged not-a-goddamned-monkey with one hand at arm’s length.
From the shock on their faces, I assume they can see something in my hand. I close my left eye and turn my head to the left. Seen with only my right eye the thing is blurry, but it’s definitely there.
“Sweet Jesus, what is that thing?” cries the tech to my right. I turn my head and look at him.
“I don’t know. Yours looks more like a squid wearing the biggest cockroach in the world.”
He screams and staggers back, batting at his head. His hands pass through the squidroach, touching nothing but air and errant hair. I’d be screaming too, but these drugs are quite good.
Captain Adams shouts for a medic. Human chaos erupts around me, but I am in the center of a clear space, with room to swing a cat. Literally, assuming the cat is the same approximate size as the bug monkey thrashing in my one-handed—shit, that hurts!
I let go, welts rising on my wrist where I’ve just been bitten. The creature drops to the floor and bounds away. Somebody screams, and everybody who isn’t kneeling in a clump by Willis is now looking around in a panic.
Bug monkey scrambles up a set of wall plates, finding and claiming a stony perch atop them. Nobody’s gaze follows it.
So... it disappeared from everyone else’s view when I let go. For an absent-minded moment I wonder whether there is a consistent set of physical laws governing this place, dictating what can and can’t be seen, touched, heard, and felt when surrounded by rune tech in the dark midst of the Abyssal Void. Have previous navigators had the luxury of experimenting?
Voidheron is a new ship. Maybe the parasites are a new thing. Certainly nobody is acting like this has happened before.
There is a swishing of fabric, and someone appears immediately in front of me. It’s the black not-quite-a-man with those-aren’t-dreadlocks—“Dreadman” is as good a name as any, I suppose. His face is not a pallid cat’s-eye—it is a pair of massive, vertical lips, slightly open, with a gaping slash of black mouth between them the color of tar in the shade. I can smell his breath, and the odor is somewhere between “Rottweiler” and “perfume counter.”
“Them eating you.” His voice is a gurgling baritone, the barely intelligible words rolling all wrong across a pair of black tongues. “Them trick us, we travels. All eating.” Pidgin grammar and bad pronunciation. “Them eating we all. Eating home. Eating sky.”
To my left I see people clustered around Willis, a medic straddling her and administering CPR while a pool of blood spreads from the right side of her face. To my right, panicked techs scan the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. At the far end of the room the captain shouts at a group, sending several running for the door. If anybody can actually see Dreadman in front of me, they don’t appear to have noticed him.
“I don’t understand. Who are you? Who is ‘we?’”
“We. All. Eating.” Dreadman’s pidgin sounds insistent. “Them eating you now.”
The parasites? I reach up, as if for a hat, but feel nothing. “Eating me?” I ask.
“Not you,” he says, pointing at my face. “All you.” He gestures up, at the runes I assumed only I could see, up in the void, beyond the fleshy tentacles amassed in the vault of the arched ceiling.
Up, he gestures, and my vision rushes up and out. I see a world rune, like the one for Earth, or Tenska Terra, but the feeling I get from it sickens me. It smells like death, like an abattoir abandoned unwashed after the final herd has been slaughtered.
There are other runes like it, other worlds devoured, a few freshly dead, many long dry, like old bones.
There are thousands of living runes, and among them I see the rune for Earth. I shiver. The sky is full of places, and paths between them. I see an entire universe of possibilities and promise, and I recognize this vision as a temptation impossible for any thinking being to resist.
Dreadman’s people are just like us, only with bigger lips, and where do they put their eyes? It doesn’t matter. Just like us, they ride rune ships through the Abyssal Void. Correction: They rode rune ships, before they got eaten. But it wasn’t that their navigators failed them. They embraced the rune tech fully and followed the spider into her parlor. Except the parlor is the path to new worlds, and the spider is invisible unless you’ve got a special kind of brain damage. Also, maybe you have to be standing in the
right place while somebody bleeds on the floor.
It is so obvious now. We didn’t invent rune tech. It is too illogical, too inconsistent with the rest of what we know. This “technology” lies so far outside of the way we think, the way our science works, that human invention in this realm is utterly implausible. Even our craziest religions couldn’t have brought this into our grasp.
No, this was leaked to us by a malevolent, eternally hungry, voraciously patient entity. And I can see it, out there at the center of the void whose edges we are traversing. Tentacles and tendrils reach outward from the maw at the center, looking for purchase, seeking something, anything to eat.
But Voidheron isn’t the meal of choice. She’s just a way to get humans to etch runes on Earth’s surface, runes that will eventually open Earth to the void, granting that purchase, enabling an embodiment of appetite to pull Flagstaff, Bellevue, Wisconsin, and the rest of our big, wet rock onto the dinner plate.
I am swaying a bit, unsteady on my feet. My knees are weak from the drugs that are steadying my soul. I may sway, but I am not gibbering in fear at the things I see, the sudden sense of doom, or the knowledge that humanity is poised to topple past the brink of extinction. I remember the depression I felt during transition, but now I am just a spectator to that soul searing. These drugs are good.
There’s nothing I can do, is there? Once Voidheron arrives at Terra Tenska, no one will listen to me, the brain-damaged, drug-addled runewright who ripped out an officer’s eye. Because that’s the story they’ll tell.
There are more rune ships crossing, and many, many more being built. Are the parasites new? Are they the beginning of the end, the first signs that the consumption is imminent? How much time is left to us before there are enough patches of rune-wrought tarmac on Earth for the devourer to find purchase sufficient to scrape the planet clean, to reap everything into that distant maw?
Space Eldritch Page 34