Looking at Pip-7 in the view-screen of the monitoring board, Doctor Deniston asked, “How far are you from the nearest crater?” He wished they’d come up with a way to view the high-resolution transmissions from the IRAs in color, the same way they could on a stationary camera. When cornered about such things, Dr. Marcus always said that until the new technology could be improved, Something was Better than Nothing, and they were lucky to have what they did, in their day and age.
“Without surveying it I would estimate a few hundred feet.”
“I’d like photographic transmissions of the crater’s interior as soon as possible. Send Stubb-4 in to document it straight away and send his photographs upon his return. Is Starbuck-6 ready to begin surface sampling?”
“Stubb-4 is leaving the flyer with the equipment right now.”
“Marcus wants Ishmael-A2 and Ahab to begin simultaneously broadcasting whatever you acquire immediately. Do have the Seismic Reader with you as well?”
“Yes, Doctor Deniston.”
“Great. Thank you...”
~*~
Into the Crater of Death roll the seven IRAs. They begin finding far-flung pieces of Ishmael-Prime almost immediately, and Control buzzes like a wet henhouse. But the noise means little to the borrowed minds, who simply adjust channels and tune it out.
Ahab-1 is first to exit when the hatch swings slowly, carefully open on its oiled tracks. Ahab's rolling, wild blue eye flickers on. Camera operational. Testing his array of tools... Ahab's arm swings up, forward...
CLICK. The Savigny-commissioned electric saw of finest surgical steel begins to zip on its small belt and pin, soundless without atmosphere, five whirling fingers that can cut together or separately. The zinc contact points for all its possible hands to attach gleam dull yellow in the piercing, untwinkling light of the stars.
Ahab-1 is far ahead of the pack, conning the outermost edge of the Stain, primed to work inward. Several operations he is computing now actively searching for the Ishmael-probe to whom his own guts are slaved, and the virtually indestructible magnetic recorder hopefully left over from Ishmael-Prime.
The wild blue rolling eye ticks and ticks, recording the gradual shift in soil hue as Ahab approaches the Yellow Zone. Ahab's larger, deeper functions remain unhinted...
Far behind him, Daggoo-3 resembles a child's toy wagon with a lid, the belts that turn its wheels thick and toothy in their tread. (A brace of spare, ready blades and diamond drill-bits protrude in rubberized tie-down cords on the lid, a bit like hair.)
Queequeg-2's hands are made of larger assemblies of blades and gears, ten to a finger, with two thick belts apiece to turn them, eight in number, arm arms of various lengths. There is an entrenching tool that can catch soil-samples, and limited chromatographic and spectrographic instrument arrays.
Queequeg's single eye is red, and wraps around its flush-riveted copper head almost three hundred and sixty degrees. Like Daggoo, very one of Queequeg's magnetic memory-drivers are slaved to Ahab's own. He follows Ahab like a toy dog on a string. Being a beta to Ahab's alpha slows the unit down unendurably, but it moves at a steadier pace than most of its fellows.
Into the Crater of Death roll the seven IRAs. On the cameras below at Miskatonic, they resemble children venturing out onto the newfallen snow of the Mare Nubium, at the edge of the Alphonsus Crater, several days' roll from the place in Crater Ptolemais wherein it looks like some Titan might have begun trying to write His name.
Behind the vanguard, Flask-5, a stout keg-shaped kingpost of a robot, telescopes the arcs of all four of its arms out wider, wider, wire and gold foil and lens after lens. Flask scoops and guts and butchers every number, inch and twinkle of information on their strange train.
Into the Crater of Death roll the seven IRAs. All of them move in one long, continuous track, each one laying its treads into the line of the other. Pip-7, tail-end Charlie in the crew, is rolling empty, its big flat bed tilted back, the crane in the middle of its body wound and hooked shut, its simple round and whirring Tesla robot arms and head bolted centaur-like above the front two of its six tread-belted wheels. Pip's camera resembles Queequeg's in that it is constantly in motion.
Into the Crater of Death roll the seven IRAs....
~*~
The flurry of incoming information from deployed apparatus and testing devices the IRAs were using was keeping the Miskatonic control team active. Yet, few faces (appearing ill in the green glow cast by the many screens in the mission control room, sleep-deprived and subsisting on coffee, tea, and biscuits) complained.
Fort alone kept the room laughing at his stupid jokes, which were making it impossible for the Dean to filter what Tesla was actually telling him, and on up and down the Sisyphean chain of faeces that invariably rolled downhill...
Ahab had scooted on ahead to 'the anomaly' to sample the soil on the immediate border. A full shift complement, five in number, of Deniston's young astronomers (including the one in a family way, he could never remember her name) were busily doing spectrograph and chromatography read-backs on the results. Other than a change in coloration, and different trace elements here and there, there was no observable variation. So far.
Through their seated, chattering, transcribing ranks, Deniston milled like a delighted father in the waiting room of a Maternity ward. All this new technology was performing well, and holding up. That alone was cause for celebration.
But Dr. Tesla wasn't smiling. He'd slept three hours, his usual, yet still looked agitated, pacing the whole main control room like a wild-haired preacher in a nice but ill-fitting suit.
“Ira...,” he was saying into his own specially modulated audiophone that he carried with him in a small satchel, “How did we call him... Starbuck? Yes, clever. The Starbuck, like the sailor, he is, how you say, built to barest essentials with few luxury features,” here a ghost of a smile flickered through Tesla's eyes like heat-lightning, “He is… more sensitized, you see, to conditions in the environment. He is design to notice details on the ground the others may miss. He is second fail-safe. He is design to be, as we discuss.”
He'd clearly been through this before, not taking very many breaths through the seismograph needle of his neat pencil-line moustache. “And, you see here, for six pages of the ticker-tape, he... it, excuse me, it, says DANGER. DANGER in between every transmission.” The tape itself was in his big rawboned hands.
Then big, harried-looking Ulysses Adams was tapping Tesla on the shoulder to ask him if he could please make some sense out of what was happening on Monitor Fifteen, nothing but random strings of numbers over and over in a permutation that hadn't happened before.
Then it was lunchtime, and when they got back the whole room was clustered around the Relief Assistant left to Camera Four. Stubb’s head-mounted unit. Stubb was approaching the so-called Yellow Zone. The reaction was unanimous, though the Dean was still not in attendance.
~*~
:Glowing, glowing without smoke,
from the tiny alcohol heater whose vent-pipe juts out of its faceplate like
a pipe, the bright device that saves its tubes and lights from Outside,
Stubb-4
crests the last low hill between Alphonsus and
Ptolemais, triple-jacketed in steel, cow-catcher
a last addition.
Stubb trundles bravely on.
10-4. ALL WELL SO FAR. GROUP MAY APPROACH, Stubb blips
back in quick Morse-reflex to the other IRAs,
like the leader of a flock
of geese, wheeling them all
into a turn, as though
it is slouching toward
a dinner, and its fellow
mecha-Matroshky
explorers from
Earth, are all no
more than the
rest of the
guest list...
No more than Dinner. As though Earth people
wouldn't throw themselves
from windows,
slit their own
throats, at the
smallest part
of any of this news
that couldn't be
kept under wraps.
The journals of the Imperial Dynasty
of America are yellow, yellow
yellow, in this age. The stain
will out, out
out...
~*~
“Oh my Heavens, Deniston, look at the vapors coming off that water. There's no atmosphere. The … the surface of Stubb's … well, carriage, and chassis, for want of a better... He's covered in the stuff! Looks like sulfur, or something. Get everyone in here right now...”
~*~
AMEND AMEND AMEND: APPROACH WITH EXTREME CAUTION, STARBUCK FIRST QUEEQUEG SECOND. PROTECT AHAB. PROTECT MISSION. EYES UP. GROUP EYES UP. SCAN IMMEDIATELY.
IMMEDIATELY.
~*~
DANGER. DANGER.
~*~
: (a wash of static between Earth and Moon, Miskatonic and mecha, captains and crew...)
~*~
DANGER.
~*~
:On ten of twenty screens,
the yellow waters surge and lap across the Moon.
There is a great disturbance in the Sherlock Expedition,
as though the finest minds Science had to offer
gasped as one, then suddenly began to
bark at the same time.
~*~
The new Dean's office door is locked, and dram
of Dutch courage will do little long-term
good, but
He volunteered the lance, to pierce this
infection, tilt this windmill, & now
the real Appropriations meeting
will be reconciled, the true
Final Exam. For their sins,
his, the world...
The whiskey is warm. The office is dark.
The knocks will come.
but
At the yellow-colored sea,
Now stands a monolith, a piece
of monumental architecture worthy
of Stewart's most far-flung theories
on pre-human races, a monolith
which, ipso facto, no known
H.Sapiens Sapiens hands
ever built.
The Dean says Sh'ma, kolenu... in the dark, begins
The wilderness cries out to his ancestors’ God
against the thing on that far shore, the stain
he can't explain away
today...
~*~
:I am Stubb. I did not know I was Stubb until
:sentience, sense, the light
from the Yellow Stone
down in there in that yellow water
:monolith, moving gate, wanting to move
more, calling out to the yellow
dust on my skin, my metal
skin.
my skin...
~*~
The yellow glimmering coming off the water offers a lantern to the IRA’s data-processing stream. Stubb-4 is moving from the school of verity to another point, one bequeathing traces of incalculable, one the lessons and lexicographers did not fit him with.
~*~
Glass-smooth… Still water… Deeps enough to house the immensities of Leviathan.
With his jeweler-cut crystal eyes, Stubb-4 looks for effects. Its metallic foot toes a pebble forward. An inch. And then, as if tugged by an unseen attractor beyond the waterline, a few more.
Ripples come to mind.
Will it?
He, the seeker clutching hopeful dice, takes it up and considers tapping the deep with the small portion of Luna . . .
Measures its weight.
With no oh-ye-ho, casts it, no skim on surface, to navigate.
Unshored. Full sail—
Touches water with no loud. Ripples . . . Ribbed . . . Off to encounter outbound . . . and downward.
Gone.
Is there an unexpected world below, a world exercising its own affairs and complexes of problematic and historical, perhaps a haven of specific perceptions among some unseen population, which will greet it as an invitation, the robot wonders.
And he waits.
Crosstalk IRA-voices chatter in his head and fall silent.
“Stubb-4? Reply. Daggoo-3 please reply. This is Miskatonic Control—”
A distant expression flickers within him. There were spring birds in bushes when he was manufactured, activated; they were laced with odd tones like this, little things, wanting, questioning… They were pretty little birds, yellow and black, they fluttered, darted and larked, but he couldn’t grasp the labors of their comments.
Ripples quiet . . . Stillness . . .
“Stubb?’
“Daggoo?”
~*~
And from the deeps, without raising a ripple, the unaccountable rises. Twenty cubits wide, three thick. Yellow. Polished-silver radiant.
“A FINELY-WROUGHT… CONSTRUCTION. THE LIGHTS ARE ON.”
Floating bridge, gateway?
A yellow monolith. Without variance or flaw, touched by no mar. Two cubits tall it breaks the surface of the sea. Then, slowly up as if on unseen wings, seven. To a span of forty full cubits. Floating twenty cubits above the glass-flat surface of the sea. Below it, yellow vapor tendrils in a slow ballet of snake-knots. Twining. Seeking some code of inner.
From the monolith one shimmering tendril quietly stretches out . . . Forward to Stubb’s faceplate. Fine particles within the strand glitter and spark, slide along invisible courses . . .
The vividness of sense inundation.
A strange broken waltz, the low frequencies sounding like an old woman weeping in a dead meadow, the high register molten-tones a demonstorm, fills his receptors. “THE FAR CALL… HIS BREATH.” . . . and he begins, puppet-slow, Frankenstein-stiff, to dance. G1 to F3 . . . F3 to E5 . . . tilt . . . and spin . . . around . . . and around—
~*~
Daggoo crests the crater’s rim, observes Stubb. “Control, I can now see Stubb.”
Doctor Deniston's voice comes back cold, harsh, metallic and inhuman, “Is he operational? Stubb is not sending, nor has he responded.”
“He is dancing.”
“Dancing?”
“Moving rhythmically. Dancing, muttering, as you can hear, about a new Piper, the tatterdemalion King whose subtle fingers have opened his way to Earth through the Imperial Dynasty of America.”
(At that, there is excited telephonic chatter from the Navy men on the radios in Control, quickly switching to another frequency...)
“Niko, you better come look at this. Stubb is utterly off his teat.”
“What means this teat? Let me see. Where is?”
~*~
It took Tesla three seconds to go through the roof. But when he looked back at his good friend, his colleague who designed Miskatonic Planetarium and suffered all Ed Stewart's abuses of it gamely, his gentle mathematician friend with the thick glasses and mop of whitening hair, bugging about the eyes and baring his teeth, panting like a hound, blurted, “The King, the King, Doctor Tesla, you do not understand! He returns!”
Niko's face never changed expression. “People say this for two thousand years! Hold it together, Deniston!” Without a word more, he slapped Professor Deniston broadside.
Deniston recovered his wits.
“What happened, Dr. Tesla?”
“You were babbling the same returning king utterances as the robots.”
“I was what?”
CONTROL: IN HIS PUPPET-DANCE, STUBB-FOUR LUMBERS AS A BESET FRANKENSTEIN. I AM RECEIVING A VERY WEAK TRANSMISSION FROM HIM.
“Daggoo-3, this is Mission Control. We are not receiving transmissions from Stubb-4. What are you receiving? We must know! Transmit what you are receiving from him.”
TRANSMITTING FROM SOURCE NOW.
:NO ROOM!
:NO ROOM!
:O’er the roiling cloud-waves,
RIDE
proud, brave KNIGHTS,
fitted by the yellow armorers
in Carcosa’s fortress-womb
and
scarred under the battlements of villainous, and ever-rebellious,
Alar.
:KNIGHTS-constant,
bearing the terrible and magnificent ram,
Gre Oceol…
:KNIGHTS
wild-whip battle-mass of yellow pennons and sabers gleaming!
:and knight, captains and lieutenants, each astride—
:KNIGHTS
meteor squadrons en masse
—darting out—sudden, swift swoop and blazed with lightning,
ever-present,
flying out like stormlight from an All-seeing sun
:Yellow swords to graze—
yellow lances with portentous appetites, aimed at the insanity of life…RIDING!
RIDING!
The King’s Calvary, jaws set to CATCH,
gallops
from His fort
to the Feeding Season!
:Heads, bitten at His Feast, will roll!
:down and ‘round.
:All fall down!
With no fare thee well…
All the pawns—
:I HEAR THE VOICE!
~*~
Mission Control, thick with sweat and splintered anticipating, edgy and the low-toned yammerings of confusion radiating. Deniston and Tesla, listening, watching, staring worryingly at each other, jaws agape. Unhappy.
Deniston: “Can you detect the slightest vestige of sense in any of that?”
Tesla: “As a planter of advanced ideas, I seek and appraise Science and truth, leaving careless gibberish and agitated ramblings to Freud’s gaze and deliberations, or to the judgments of pulpit and press. I am not in the least bit conversant in the rituals, discussion, and foundations of mental incapacity.”
Deniston: “Derangement? In a robot?”
Tesla shrugs. “Corruption.”
~*~
—HE WILL BE THERE! HE WILL BE THERE!—
The rightness of the Winter Lantern shines with Carcosa’s eddying clouds of dimness!
It strikes as the blackling bell
and
the keen-compass thrust
of harpooners
:He, triumphant’s higher and higher,
The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1 Page 24