The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by Brian Stableford

  There was a rustling on the bough from which Tremeloe’s head was hanging down, and he saw something moving behind the head that was talking to him. He couldn’t see its body, so it might have been a lizard, or a snake, or neither...but he could see its head, and its suddenly-gaping mouth, and its forked tongue, and its oh-so-human eyes....

  However its body was formed, it had to be big: bigger than an anaconda. For a moment, Tremeloe thought that he was about to lose the only entity in this bizarre world that was capable of holding a conversation with him—that the un-man from Pnakotus was about to be swallowed whole by the monster—but then the leaves moved. The leaves were clever, it seemed, and surprisingly strong, given their apparent delicacy. They flipped the stealthy predator into the air, and it fell, crashing through the branches, seemingly moving up and up but actually tumbling down and down...until it hit the boggy surface with a glutinous semi-splash.

  It was invisible by then, but when Tremeloe looked at the green streaks that were visible between the crowns of his trees and its neighbors, he saw multiple movements, as if creatures akin to crocodiles were homing in on the splash, in anticipation of a feast. He could not see the crocodiles’ eyes any more than he could distinguish their bodies, but he did not doubt that they would be human.

  As hells go, he thought, it’s not so bad to be a human-head-fruit, given that we have such defenders to prevent our being stolen and eaten. As a biologist, however, he knew full well that the whole purpose of a fruit is to be eaten, and thus deduced that if he really were being defended, the purpose of that defense might only be to preserve him for the preferred fructicarnivore...except, of course, that he was not a seed-bearing entity at all, but a mind-bearing entity, which might or might not change the logic of the situation completely.

  He suddenly remembered a line that everyone at Miskatonic knew, supposedly quoted—in translation, of course—from the mysterious Necronomicon: “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu lies sleeping.” There was a fragment of verse, too, which ended “that is not dead which can eternal lie,” but the relevant point seemed to be, if the un-man from Pnakotus could be taken seriously—which was surely necessary in a world where madness no longer seemed to be possible—that dead Cthulhu was no longer asleep, but awake, and that his awakening had changed the world out of all recognition, maybe not overnight, but rapidly...and purposefully.

  “What did you mean,” Tremeloe said to his companion, “this is what the human race was designed to be and to become?”

  “Just that,” the other replied. “That was why Cthulhu and the star-spawn came to Earth: to produce and shape humankind. The raw material was rather unpromising when they first arrived, and seemed to be headed for insect domination, but they’re patient by nature, and we saw immediately what the results of their project would be, at least in the shorter term. They didn’t bother us—just worked alongside us for tens of millions of years. Ours was a parallel project, after all. They create, we record—we’re complementary species. They seemed to be leaving us alone, just as we left them alone...although I always had my suspicions about the flying polyps. Maybe this is what they always intended, for all of us...except that we already know that we escaped to the belated Coleopteran Era after the Polyp Armageddon. We were only ever present in spirit in the Human Era. We never interfered, except to observe and record—for our own purposes, of course. Nothing was supposed to leak out. Maybe that’s why Cthulhu took against us, although I can’t imagine how the garbled rubbish that found its way from our records into Al Azif and its various supposed translations could have interfered with the star-spawn’s plans for shaping human intelligence.”

  Tremeloe had only the vaguest notion of who—or what—Cthulhu and the star-spawn were supposed to be, even though everyone at Miskatonic knew the basics of what was, in effect, the university’s own native folklore. “As I remember it,” he said to his companion, “this Cthulhu character was supposed to be a sort of giant invisible octopus, which came to Earth from another star, and whose eventual resurrection after a long dormancy on the ocean bed was supposed to bring about the end of the world as we knew it. You’re saying that he’s real, and it’s actually happened?”

  “It’s difficult to describe Cthulhu in terms of shape and substance,” the other replied, with a calmness that now seemed rather ominous. “He’s primarily a dark matter entity. You know that ninety per cent of the universe’s mass is non-baryonic, right? That it interacts with your sort of matter gravitationally, but not electromagnetically? Well, Cthulhu, the star-spawn, and most of the other life-forms in the universe are essentially dark matter beings, although they can transform themselves wholly or partly into baryonic matter when conditions are right and the whim takes them. Don’t ask me what counts as right or wrong in that context—we Yithians can move our minds in space and time via hyperbaryonic pathways, but we’re not creative. Exactly what the relationship is between Cthulhu’s kind, matter and mind, we don’t know—but they’re certainly interested in them, simply because they are creative. Why they create, and how they select their creative ends, I literally can’t imagine, but the simple fact is that Cthulhu spent hundreds of millions of years shaping the ancestors of human beings, partly in order to produce the kind of intelligence that my kind can borrow—but that was only a means, not an end.”

  “And this is the end?”

  “Possibly. It’s just as likely to be another phase in the grand plan, requiring something more than evolution by selection. The various cultists who decided, on the basis of leaked Pnakotic lore, that Cthulhu and his hyperbaryonic kindred are gods, looked forward to his return as a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom—a time when humankind would be freed from its self-imposed moral shackles and taught new ways to revel in violence and slaughter—but that was mostly wishful thinking.”

  Tremeloe thought about fruit with human brains, and eagles and crocodiles with human eyes, and extrapolated that imagery to the notion of an entire ecosphere in which human intelligence had been redistributed on a profligate scale, in order that human mentality might experience all of nature red in tooth and claw in all its horror and glory...and the notion of a “holocaust of ecstasy and freedom” no longer seemed so alien. As an individual, he was certainly not free, nor had he tasted anything akin to ecstasy as yet, but if one tried to see the situation from without, as a single vast pattern....

  “Are humans like the one I used to be extinct now?” he asked. “Has the harvest of minds taken place, so that all individual personalities could be relocated?”

  “Probably not,” replied the un-man who should not, in his own estimation, ever have been reduced to a mere fruit. “So far as our explorers could tell, original-model humans, living in societies of various sorts, lasted long into the intellectual diaspora...although they soon became as opaque to our technology of possession as entities like this. We only have a vague idea of the interim between the era a few millennia down the line from the time that you and I recall and the advent of the Coleopteran Migration.”

  There really might be things, Tremeloe thought, harking back to the Necronomicon again, that man was not meant to know. Would I be better off on a tree where I had no language in common with any of my fellow fruit? Would I be better off trying to account for the situation by the force of my own unaided intellect, rather than listening to this bizarre lunacy? Except that it can’t be mere lunacy, unless there are spoiled fruit here as well as healthy ones, whose sanity is being eaten away from within by mindworms....

  He quite liked the idea of mindworms, although he knew that it ought to have frightened him. His “liking” was purely aesthetic, so far as he could tell. He thought that he was capable of feeling pleasure, just as he was probably capable of feeling panic, but his new hormonal orchestra was obviously in a quiet mood at present, tranquilizing his brain chemistry more efficiently than the intrinsically-horrific thoughts he was formulating therein were disturbing it. If that remained the case, then his situation would surely b
e better than bearable, and more akin to a heaven than a hell.

  It would probably be painful if any bat ever got to bite into him, or any snake were to swallow him whole, but while he remained safe, successfully protected by the leaves that surrounded him—whose photosynthesis was presumable producing the blood that nourished his flesh and thoughts alike—and the eagles who fed upon the bats, he was feeling no physical pain, and no particular mental anguish. If his fate was to suffer eternal inertia, with no idle hands for with the Devil might make work, he thought that he might be able to cope—and since it was now proven that he could be reincarnated, perhaps he had an infinite and infinitely various future to look forward to, in which he would have abundant opportunity to fly and to swim, to squirm and to walk, always knowing that even if pain and death were to arrive, however hideous they might be on a temporary basis there would be other lives to come: times to rest and times to ponder, times to eat as well as to be eaten....

  Or was it, he wondered, merely his reduced capacity to feel such emotions as horror and terror that made the future seem so promising? Might he, in fact, be better off as a gibbering wreck, consumed from within by mindworms, his very consciousness reduced to immaterial dust?

  The invisible sun was climbing behind the cloud-sheet. Eventually, it began to rain. The drops seemed tropically large, but when they splashed on his chin and his cheeks the liquid explosions were more pleasurable than painful, and the moisture was welcome. The shower didn’t last long. When it stopped the cloud was much lighter and thinner. Rapid shadows occasionally fluttered across Tremeloe’s face, but no bats or birds came close to him. The eagles patrolling the sky were drifting lazily in slow circles.

  “I know that you never expected to be here,” Tremeloe said to his companion, “and that you’d rather be snug and warm in Pnakotus, dreaming of one day becoming a beetle, but this really isn’t as bad as all that, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” the other replied, “and not knowing is something that my kind aren’t used to. I shouldn’t be here. I’ve borrowed humanity in the past, for research purposes but I’m not human. I wasn’t designed for this. It’s not my fate. You’re a prisoner of time, so you can’t begin to understand how Yithians think, any more than I can begin to imagine how Cthulhu and the star-spawn might think, but believe me when I say that this is wrong.”

  Tremeloe did believe him, after a fashion, but he couldn’t sympathize. If all the silly rumors about Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee were actually true, and the professor’s body really had been taken over by an alien time-traveler for several years way back in the 1900s, then the alien time-travelers in question evidently didn’t observe the principle of informed consent, and could hardly complain if the tables were turned on them. They had poked their noses into human affairs, and had no right to bleat that they were only reporters, not creators, as if that somehow let them off the moral hook...except, of course, that the human world had moved beyond good and evil now, into an era when morality no longer had hooks, or claws, or censorious staring eyes.

  Tremeloe remembered the bat’s eyes then, and the eagle’s. No, they hadn’t been censorious, or even judgmental—but he felt sure that they had been more than merely avid. There had been something in them that was more than mere sight or mere appetite, which might well have been “beyond good and evil”, but held an emotion that was by no means entirely free of dread.

  I’m just a head-fruit hanging on a tree, Tremeloe thought. The birds and the crocodiles still have animal bodies and animal hormones. Perhaps I have the best of it, in this far-from-the-best of all possible worlds...but if the cycle goes on forever, I’ll have it again and again and again, ad infinitum.

  Such was the comforting positive nature of that thought that he did not notice that the sky had become even bluer until the murmur of mostly-incomprehensible voices altered him to the fact that something was going on.

  At first, he thought that the cloud was simply clearing, its remnants evaporated by the hot tropical sun that was ascending towards its zenith—but then he saw the bloated sun drift free of the brilliant white clouds to take possession of the sky, and saw that its flames were redder and angrier than he had ever known them before.

  It really is much later than either of us thought, he said to himself, but then doubted the judgment, as he realized that the excessive blueness of the unclouded sky and the excessive redness of the sun were both optical illusions, caused by the fact that the sky was full of creatures; creatures that were not quite invisible, although they had to be made of something other than the kind of matter with which he was familiar: something so alien as to be almost beyond perception. The big birds were flying far away with rapid wing-beats.

  Tremeloe was conscious of gravity now, although it did not seem to be tugging him in the direction of the green Earth, but in the direction of the alien sky, whose no-longer-kindly light hid all the multitudinous stars of the incredibly, unimaginably vast universe within its dazzling glory. “What are they?” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

  The other heard him. “Star-spawn,” he replied. “If you could see them, the impression of shape they’d give you would be much like Cthulhu’s, on a much smaller scale: vaguely cephalopodan, with a scaly tegument, and oddly tiny wings that shouldn’t work but do.”

  Somehow, Tremeloe grasped what the other meant by “the impression of shape”. The star-spawn had mass, but their matter was utterly alien, obedient to different rules of dimension and form, whose relationship with the kind of matter making up his own flesh, and that of the tree of which he was now a part, was essentially mysterious...and far, far beyond mere matters of good and evil.

  The raptors were nowhere to be seen now. If their existential role was to protect the trees of human life and their heady harvest from giant bats, they had played their allotted parts and made their exit, until the next day.

  But it’s not yet noon, Tremeloe thought, wishing perversely that he were capable of terror, in order that he might feel a little more human, a little more himself. Even mayflies live for a day.

  He had been biologist, though, during his larval stage, and he knew that mayflies actually lived much longer than a day, even though their imago stage was a brief airborne climax to a life spent wallowing in mud. He knew, too, that from a detached scientific viewpoint, every mayfly had a living ancestry that stretched back through their larval stages and generation after generation of evolving living creatures, all the way back to some primordial protoplasmic blob, or some not-yet-living helical carbonic thread. Only its climax was ephemeral, and by comparison with the billion years it had taken to produce the fly, there was hardly any difference at all between an hour, a day and fifty-six years.

  Beyond good and evil, Tremeloe knew, human philosophers held that there ought to be a world in which good would no longer be refined by the absence of evil—of pain, of hunger, of thirst, and so on—but in positive terms, in terms of an active, experienced good whose mere absence would replace outdated redundant evil. But the good and evil that he had now moved beyond wasn’t human good and evil at all, and the speculations of human philosophers were only relevant to it insofar as they had helped to shape his own consciousness, his own expectations, and his own intellectual flavor.

  The good that the world embraced now was something essentially alien, and neither Tremeloe nor any of his fellow human fruit—nor even the reluctant Yithian refugee from legendary Pnatokus—had any words, or the slightest imagination, with which to describe or get to grips with it.

  As the star-spawn descended to enjoy the crop that had been hundreds of millions of years in the creative shaping, and mere hours in the final ripening, Tremeloe still had time enough to realize that his new hormonal orchestra, quiet until now, was not unequipped with sensations akin to horror and terror, agony and fury...and to appreciate the irony of the fact that those sensations too, just as much as his thoughts, his memories and his knowledge and consciousness of history and progress, of space and
time, of matter and light, and most especially of strangeness, were all elements of a nutritive and gustatory experience that something so very like him as to be near-identical would have to relive time and time again, from the wrong perspective, if not ad infinitum, then at least until the star-spawn had finally had their fill, and had abandoned Earth to the long-delayed Coleopteran Era.

  The star-spawn fed, like patient gourmets, and the blazing sun moved on in its patient arc, heading for a sunset that Tremeloe would not see...this time. He ran the gamut of his new emotions, reacting with his thoughts and his imagination as best he could, even though he wished, resentfully, that he was disinclined to do anything different.

  There was a long future still ahead of him, but even that would merely be an eye-blink in the history of the New Eden that Earth had become. Eventually, the multi-tentacled monsters of dark matter would pass on to pastures new, nature would reassert itself, and the primal wilderness would return.

  The only thing we were ever able to deduce about the mind of the God who was in charge of Creation before Cthulhu arrived, Tremeloe reflected, with obliging but slightly piquant serenity, as the matter comprising his delectable freshness was chewed, absorbed and digested without his ever quite losing consciousness, is that he must have an inordinate fondness of beetles. And perhaps he had good taste.

  THE SEEDS FROM THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS