Except that, according to him, they were actually bloodthirsty seeds from the Mountains of Madness.
Madness really had become mountainous of late: dangerous and forbidding, but strangely magnificent, magnetic in spite of its murderousness.
“The servants can cope,” she said, more to reassure herself than me. “They coped with the sanitarium; this is just an extension of that. No matter how creepy they find him, they’ll put a brave face on it. I’ll see to it. They’ve done it before. They have it easy, now that there’s only three of us to look after. One last traumatized cripple won’t change that. We can all cope.”
Before the war, the house had had a domestic staff of seventeen, and the ground staff, including the stable-lads, had numbered ten. Now, the domestic staff was reduced to six and the ground staff to two—not counting the girls—the stables having been converted into garages and equipment-sheds. Everything was shrinking—the family most of all, now reduced from ten to three. Not all the missing were dead; some had simply moved on, but the effect was the same. Relatively speaking, though, the present staff did have it easy, by comparison with the numbers the pre-war staff had had to cope with, in terms of permanent residents and frequent guests. Diminished or not, they could cope
Our wealth had diminished too, although we still had enough. My grandfather, the thirteenth Earl, had been fond of saying that land was the only true wealth, but he’d been wrong; the only true wealth now was money, a mercurial phantom deprived of any real substance. The idea that land was anything but a sticky matrix for trenches, for battles, for bloodshed....
“I’m going to take these out to the greenhouse now,” I told Helen, who was still waiting, although here was nothing I could tell her, as yet, that might have been worth waiting for. “I’ll get busy tomorrow, with Oates’ help and guidance. Once the basics are out of the way, I’ll be able to start pumping him, diplomatically, for more information as to what happened down there in the Antarctic, and where he’s been since then. However crazy or horrible it is, I’ll tell you everything.”
She knew, I supposed, that it could hardly be anything other than crazy or horrible, but she no longer fled in fear of such realities.
“We have to look after Mercy,” she said, not because I needed reminding but because she wanted to make the declaration for her own psychological purposes.
“I know,” I assured her, for similar reasons.
* * * *
Oates only had a few further instructions about the sticky and bloody matrix in which the seeds allegedly needed to be planted. I learned less than I hoped from the dissection and microscopic analysis of the sacrificed specimen, and the tissue-cultures I tried to set up were a complete bust—probably because the damn thing didn’t have tissues in the same sense that Earthly plants and animals had. It didn’t have cells, in the same way that Earthly life-forms had, either. If it wasn’t a single primitive entity, then it hadn’t evolved in the same way that we had, by multiplying and differentiating the same basic cell-pattern all the way from monad to man. It was more like an extremely dense, extremely elaborate network.
If a spider’s web were alive, and had initiated an evolutionary sequence, it probably wouldn’t have done so by dividing into more webs, conserving the same pattern. It would have expanded and become more labyrinthine, evolving, as it were, topologically rather than arithmetically or geometrically. That, at least, was how things seemed to me...how I managed to find a way of thinking about it that seemed to make a kind of sense. The bits of the web didn’t seem to be capable of “vegetative” reproduction, at least in the conditions I could provide, but they did seem to have some regenerative capacity, as long as they weren’t sliced up too small.
The two seeds I tried to grow in the hydroponic apparatus did nothing, even when bathed in blood and nutrients. In the end, I transplanted them into pots, partly because I figured that I needed every chance I could get under what seemed to be the better conditions. Of the six, only two made any progress at all in the first week—but two was better than none, and maybe better than I had any right to expect.
It was a tense week. Oates and I put in sixteen-hour days, save for meals, and even took lunch in the greenhouse, carefully picking up the tray at the door and handing it back in the same pseudo-ceremonial fashion, without Hollis or the scullery maid ever setting foot inside the glass palace. Ninety per cent of the effort we made went to waste, or produced only enigmatic returns, but that wasn’t entirely the point of making it.
The tropical house wasn’t what I’d call a healthy environment, but Oates didn’t seem to have brought any infectious agents back from the dead, so we did better there than we ever had in Africa. I won’t say we thrived, but we got a little better, gradually and each in our own way. Talking about old times helped us both to adapt to our new selves—and while we were talking about old times, everything went smoothly. It had it frustrating dimension, though, because it certainly wasn’t what I wanted to talk about all the time, and I think that Oates was just as keen, in his way, to tell me about the impossible things that had happened to him as I was to hear them.
That wasn’t easy, though, for either of us. I probed and I winkled, as delicately and deftly as I could, and he made efforts too, but there really were things he literally could not say, and not just for lack of an appropriate vocabulary. He was back, but he was under a spell of some kind.
By the end of the first week, we’d made as little progress with his story as we had with the task that they had allotted to him as a condition of his return, but I had become more optimistic. Just as I’d insisted on a degree of variation and gradation in the initial planting conditions of the seeds, I tried all kinds of maneuvers to figure out how to help his story grow and develop. The whole point of a jardin d’acclimation, after all, is to test different environmental conditions, in search of the optimum, in advance of the dogged struggle to train subsequent generations of plants to adapt to different optima. With only seven specimens, one of them sacrificed to microscopic analysis, I hadn’t been able to plan a proper multivariable grid, but I had at least made sure that all the eggs weren’t in one circumstantial basket. Having given me all the advice he had to give, Oates was content to yield to my expertise thereafter—that, after all, was why he was here. The cultivation of his story was an analogical process. I approached it from different directions, until I found the most suitable matrix.
The one thing a practical agriculturalist needs more than anything else is patience. Colonies aren’t built in a day. It’s a matter of generations, of lifetimes, of taking the long view...and hoping that catastrophe will stay away.
“I hope you didn’t tell them that I have some kind of magical ability,” I said to him, once, when things didn’t see to be going too well seed-wise. “After all, you’re the one with green fingers.”
It was a joke, but not a good one—in rather poor taste, in fact.
“You do have a gift,” he assured me. “I always knew that, even at Eton. The others ragged you about it, but they knew too.”
“Nothing like a gift to encourage bullying,” I observed, drily. “Except, of course, a limp. Lucky you didn’t catch that bullet until you were half a world away from the old alma mater.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” he said. He was right; it hadn’t been that bad. He deserved some credit for that. Isolated, I’d have been dead meat, figuratively speaking—not just at school, where everyone dies a little, but in the dragoons. No lieutenant had ever required a sympathetic captain as much as I had. I knew how much I owed to Oates, even though he didn’t.
“So,” I said, when all the planning had been properly carried out, the strategy measured out, and the campaign analyzed, “you were in this blizzard, hoping to fall into a crevasse, so that your mates wouldn’t trip over your body when they set off again. Then what happened?”
“I fell.”
“Into a crevasse?”
“Maybe.”
Things went on like that f
or a while longer, but in the end, the two seeds that actually consented to develop began to develop, and Oates began to find a state of mind in which he could contrive a conversational flow that went far beyond Eton and far beyond Africa.
It was a slow process, but we had time.
In order to straighten the labyrinthine story out—a much more necessary process than cutting it short—I’ll summarize, and try to put things in some sort of order. What remains vague remains vague because it was vague, in the same way that his face had been vague when I first saw it, and still was, sometimes.
He had fallen into a crevasse—not maybe but almost certainly. A bottomless crevasse. It should, in terms of mere Earthly topography, have taken him down into the sea, given that Scott’s party was on the ice-shelf, but it didn’t.
There is, it seems, another Antarctica. There’s a trivial sense in which that’s true, of course: there’s an island, perhaps an entire continent, under the ice. Once upon a time, it was warm—really warm, not merely less cold. It was a continent with rivers, and forests, and fields, and cities; but the ice had crushed all that. It had crushed everything.
“It looks so still,” Oates said, “so nearly eternal, but it’s not still, let alone eternal. Even now, the ice moves, grinding and crushing.”
There are rivers and lakes underneath the ice...even life, apparently. If the ice were to disappear, as the ice that once covered Yorkshire had disappeared, tens of thousands of years ago, the land would regenerate, just as Yorkshire has. Well, not just as Yorkshire has, because Yorkshire was only covered for a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years: a mere eye-blink of geological time, let alone cosmic time. Antarctica....well, life would come back differently there.
And that was the point, or part of it. Because as well as the trivial other Antarctica, there was a quite different and much stranger Other Antarctica
While Oates was letting this out, he often settled into a peculiar kind of reverie, letting his intelligence idle and his mouth run on. That was the only way he could talk about it, because doing so with his consciousness focused and concentrated would have activated the spell that was inhibiting his revelations. It would also have confronted him with the indescribable, the unnamable and the unthinkable, and confused him utterly. Going with the flow, on the other hand, while avoiding the worst potential obstacles, at least allowed him to skirt the truth, and thus convey some expression of it.
He did want to explain. He was an officer, and he needed to understand—and he wanted me to understand too, not just because I’d finally made it to captain but because I was his friend, and he needed me...and he wanted to warn me, to the extent that he could, about what it was that I was being required to do.
Imagine what a pickle we’d be in, here in north Yorkshire, if the ice were to come back. If there had been people here before the last Ice Age, of course—Neanderthals, I suppose—they had simply retreated ahead of the ice, but they were nomads, hunter-gatherers. They didn’t have any elaborate agriculture, any cities or any concept of the ownership of land. The notion of opposing the ice, trying to fight it, would never have occurred to them. To me, though, a lord of the manor whose family has owned and farmed the land for centuries, the idea of retreat would be a very different matter. My first impulse would be to stand fast—to find a way of holding back the ice if I could, and if I couldn’t, then to find some way of living underneath it. Yorkshire folk are legendary for their stubbornness. It wouldn’t just be the lords of the manor who thought that way. It would be everyone. We’d tunnel. We’d find a way, if there was any way to be found. We’d dig in.
Actually, maybe I wouldn’t have. Maybe I’d have retreated, having learned my lesson at Mons. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make. I’m really talking about the Antarcticans, and why there’s still an Other Antarctica, into which a hero like Captain Oates could fall, and keep on going, dead or not.
The things that once lived in Antarctica, a very long time ago, in one of the periods when it was warm, had the same kind of stubbornness as Yorkshire folk, and technological resources of which dalesmen and woldsmen can only dream. I don’t know why they couldn’t stop the ice—it’s possible that the continent itself drifted, that it came to rest on the Earth’s axis having previously been located in kinder climes. Certainly, the Earth itself cooled, after a hot phase. Once, in a past remoter still, it had been completely covered in ice; in one not quite so remote it had been entirely ice-free, but in the era Oates told me a little bit about—billions of years ago, long before the life we know had even emerged from the sea to cover the land left vacant by yet another catastrophe—the ice was on the attack. Not just the ice, either; the Earth was a busy place in those days, apparently, with more than one kind of life—more than one kind of being—fighting for its possession. Things are quiet now, but we’ve only been here for an eye-blink of geological time, so we can’t really tell, and if we could....
Anyhow, the Antarcticans dug in. When they couldn’t stop the ice, or decided not to stop it—because they might have decided not to, figuring that the ice might make a useful defensive wall against some other enemy—they tried to live underneath it, in lacunae and under the ground. Humans couldn’t do that, obviously, because life of our kind is parasitic on sunlight: no light, no plants, no food. They were different. They had other needs, other ways; they were no longer parasitic on sunlight...not, at any rate, to the same extent as us. They were highly intelligent, and Oates doubted that they thought they could establish any kind of stable situation that might endure for millions of years; they knew they’d have to keep on adapting, keep on changing...but that was their thing anyway. They were much more long-lived than we are, and they didn’t think so highly of stability.
“We’re mayflies,” Oates said, drowsily, “and we dream of prolongation, of settlement, of consistency. They didn’t see survival in those terms; they weren’t utopians.”
The Antarcticans, Oates hinted—because he had no way to explain—had strange and various resources, and they had strange and various methods too. They couldn’t keep things going forever, maybe because of their other enemies, but when they settled for dormancy—not death but dormancy—in order to wait for more favorable circumstances to come around again, they left a great deal behind. The ice crushed a lot of it, over the course of hundreds of millions of years, but the residue had been designed to withstand that. Oates thought that their enemies might have destroyed more, or else that the ones who were dug in might have suffered from some dire catastrophe of another sort—but still, the residue remained...and it still remains, much diminished, but still able, after a strange and distant fashion, to cope.
The ice melted again—more than once, Oates thought—but if that was what the sleepers were waiting for, it didn’t trigger any mass awakening. Oates had no idea what would...but he did know, for sure, that among the things they left behind were traps. Perhaps the traps had actually been disguised as crevasses, way back when, but that was definitely the way that some of them appeared now. Oates fell into one. It was bottomless. He didn’t smash his head on ice or rock, like poor Edgar Evans, and he didn’t fall into the sea to be eaten by a leopard-seal. He just fell.
Maybe he died and maybe he didn’t die, but either way, he came out of it again. They brought him out. They looked after him, as best they could, in ways that we can’t understand. They communicated with him. They even kept him up to date, as best they could, with what was happening in the world. Eventually, he was released...at a price....
* * * *
I’m getting ahead of myself slightly here, but things had become tangled; too many things were going on at once. The seeds were developing. Oates was telling his story in confused dribs and drabs. I was telling Helen what I’d learned, trying to sort it out as I went. She was looking after his leg, his toes and his fingers. And Mercy was being merciful, even volunteering to play ball on the lawn—an offer he always refused. Not to mentions the servants. Things became confused
.
I think I lost track of time, but that wasn’t a bad thing. I’d been trying to lose track of time for some while, or maybe just trying to give the time that was tracking me the slip. The tropical house became a refuge, for a while, where I dug in. I came out for dinner, of course, to keep contact with Mercy and the world, and I talked to Helen late at night, but I was dug in, while the seeds and the story grew and slowly took shape, and began—only began—to make a vestige of sense, not only of themselves, but somehow of everything.
It wasn’t easy. Sometimes, Oates’ face became unhuman again, and I was so close to him by then that when it happened, I became unhuman too, and it wasn’t a pleasant sensation at all—but the task was doable. It wasn’t quite understandable, as yet, but it as doable, and we did it. We all did it. And we all did our bit, just as everybody has to, in extreme circumstances. Paradox or not, it’s only the unreal horrors that continue to horrify us. The real ones soon go beyond mere horror, and become life. They remain traumatic, still capable of turning the human unhuman, of contriving fates worse than death, but they cease to horrify us consciously.
Sometimes, when he was trying to let something out—presumably a truth that he wasn’t supposed to reveal—Oates would pause, temporarily unable to continue, as if his tongue had swollen in his mouth and stuck to his palate. Sometimes, while I was listening, I felt strange frissons crawling through my flesh. Invariably, we were both was sweating profusely, because it was hot and humid in the greenhouse; the green leaves around us were dripping so profusely that it almost seemed to be raining indoors, but the fruit-trees didn’t mind; they could bear it.
The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 18