Eden lay in a cavern, the far wall of which was lost in tumbling mists. The weird blue glow came from the mist itself, which must be spores from the bizarre flora that covered the floor and stretched to a height that dwarfed any earthly rain forest. The "trees" were cyclopean cathedrals of fungus, huge edifices of pearly gray flesh, the gills and fruiting bodies of which exhaled the deep sea witch-glow, which attracted clouds of flying and crawling pollination suitors, and all their predators, scavengers and parasites.
The roof was festooned with fungal vegetation that dangled down to the uppermost caps of the forest, and hosted a thriving ecosystem of its own. Everywhere he looked, things ate each other and spawned offspring that bore little more than a passing resemblance to their parents.
In a perverse sort of way, it all made perfect sense. It was almost funny. Down here, the future of the world was being perfected and built. Whatever had become man might have lingered in Eden, and those left behind had ruined it, just as those above were ruining the earth, now. What came to take their place was what could survive in an exhausted, dead, ecosystem, with the sun blocked out and only carrion on which to feed. The lower life forms, the decomposers, fungi and insects, had exploded to fill the gaps, because if there was one thing about Nature he knew, it was that She hated a vacuum.
Even in the teeming madness of the sunless garden, Keyes's trail wasn't hard to follow. Fungal trees were trampled flat in a vast swath, a carpet of bioluminescent ooze like a bridal path of crushed flowers leading deeper into Eden. The infernal din of the forest almost masked the sound of Keyes stampeding through Eden like a avalanche, voices raised in a chant that no longer sounded like human speech. "Tekeli-Li! Tekeli-Li! Iå Shoggot!"
Storch limped down the trampled path, casting sideways glances into the shadows. Things stirred and stalked, a few even skulked out into the open to feast on the crushed trees and the fleeing colonies of hive insects abandoning their nests. The air was foggy with spores. Storch's skin prickled and scaled as his immune system repelled millions of fungal invaders. Sounds got trapped in pockets inside the clouds, smothering him in silence one minute, then bombarding him with odd echoes of Keyes's hymn of self-worship.
That was how he almost walked into it. Out of the fog came a black tentacle the thickness of a telephone pole. Every inch of it was alive with insects, whirring, feasting, laying eggs in the flailing limb. Storch dropped and rolled away. It passed overhead and smashed down a sixty-foot fungus that looked like a pagoda made of Godzilla cocks. Things too quick to see spilled out of it and were eaten by bigger, quicker things.
Storch ran after Keyes with his eyes wide open, but he had to dodge and duck through a shield-wall of thrashing limbs to stay within sight of it as it spastically fought off the relentless children of Eden.
Keyes had made his human colony into a Shoggoth, his "slave-form," but Storch could still make out whole and partial human bodies swimming in the black protean tide as it rolled by. The mammoth mass sprouted an array of alien appendages and organs, trumpeting horns that now took up the chant in tones that strained the range of his hearing. "Tekeli-Li! Iå Shoggot! Iå Keyes!"
The insects descended on Keyes in clouds and tornado-swarms. Stuck fast in its shifting ooze, they were so swift, so fierce, so charged with the vitality of the source of all life, that Keyes was almost overwhelmed trying to absorb them all. Storch stayed well back and just watched. The jungle was hurting it more than he could ever hope to. Already, things were starting to grow on the rolling mountain, so that every minute, it looked more and more like the forest itself come to life.
Keyes reared up and shook off its parasites. Storch cowered behind a tree as it rained insects the size of cats and Komodo dragons. He smelled his own sweat. He smelled like everything else in this place, like moldy bread and rancid meat jammed up your nose. To the things in here, he was invisible, or maybe Keyes just tasted better.
When he looked around the tree, he saw that Keyes must have found what it was looking for. In the middle of a clearing, the Shoggoth had adopted a vaguely humanoid shape, and stood more or less on two legs, head and shoulders above the tallest trees in Eden. It knelt before a lone column of rock that rose up out of the furred ground to meet the roof of the cavern. Nothing grew on it. It seemed to have been carved out of the native basalt, like the outer walls of the pit, and was marked with the same regimented patterns of circular holes, a colossal history in Braille for blind, idiot gods.
Keyes read it. Thousands of delicate tendrils caressed the walls of the tomb, for so Storch believed it to be. For worst of all to him, there was underneath all the biological insanity all around him, a bone-deep sense of familiarity about this. He'd seen it in dreams.
Keyes threw more and bigger tentacles against the wall, probing more rudely now, prying at weaknesses. Chips came loose and became boulders. It reared back and slammed into the face of the island. Eden shook. Stalactites of stone and fungi plummeted to the floor, stirring up insect swarms. Storch took cover under a shelf of violet staghorn-like growths blooming on the stalk of a tree. They drooled battery acid on him, sending him scrambling.
Keyes coiled and hit the tomb again. The ground shook. Storch noticed that the insects did not come back. Everything that ran amok in this breeding pit avoided the black basalt tower. Instinct told him it was because whatever was inside it was worse.
But he could not tear his eyes away when Keyes broke through. There was a thunderous boom and a wind shook the trees. The tower had been hermetically sealed. The wall buckled inwards, then split into mammoth blocks that spilled out onto Keyes and buried it, but the black protoplasm only oozed back up around the blocks and crept into the spaces within.
A different sort of mist spilled out of the tomb—frigid, acrid, oily with the musk of something that had not walked the earth since before the age of dinosaurs. Something that had come from the spaces Outside. Keyes emerged from the hole in the tower. In its foremost tentacles, it held something.
In his brains and in his blood, God help him, Storch recognized it. Hiram Hansen had a fossilized specimen in his cave, but it was only a tall, barrel-shaped hunk of stone, with a bewildering crown of flagella and sensory organs that might have been an outrageous sedimentary growth, enfolded in shrouds of limestone that might have been great, bat-like wings. But he'd seen it in dreams too. For all his lies, Keyes had showed him the one unspeakable truth.
Once, about a billion years ago, his ancestors had lived in layered colonies on the rocks beside and within the simmering soup of the young earth. Simple, RNA-based bacteria, they had only just learned to synthesize energy from sunlight, or to prey on one another, when something had come and taken them. Something vast and terrible and wise, watching him— It had been an Elder—a looming, proto-vegetable monstrosity, a creature too highly evolved to do its own work or fight its own wars. From stunted terrestrial life, it had created Shoggoths, and viruses, and bacteria, and dinosaurs and men like Christian Keyes and Zane Storch. In its terrible oddness, yet Storch saw the roots of what his genetic memory recognized as devils—or angels.
Now Keyes held it in tentacles quivering with unspeakable, inhuman joy. The body was petrified and encrusted with frost, yet perfectly, hideously intact. Its sensory stalks and locomotive tentacles were curled up in a knot, its leathern wings folded tightly against the ridged body. It was not dead, but only frozen, sleeping. It might come to life at any moment. Storch hoped it would, feared that it would, but the question soon became moot. Keyes ate it.
Eden stood still as Keyes digested its God. "WE ARE ONE," it said. It didn't even try to sound like Christian Keyes, anymore. It had only adopted the scientist's neural network, his consciousness, because it was far more advanced than the Shoggoth's. Now it had something better. Once again, it began to change.
Storch snapped out of his trance. He had somewhere to be, something to do. He had to stop this. He had to start something else that might be, in the end, even worse.
He let his dr
eams guide him to the pit in the nethermost bowels of Eden. It was right where they said it would be.
There was no clearing around it. The trees crowded each other as densely as possible to get close to it, and their features bore witness to some hidden source of vitality and mutation in their soil. The trees that stooped over this gate were knurled and draped in all manner of parasitic growths outrageous even for this place, and bore organs that belonged on animals, suggesting fundamentally obscene congresses were allowed, even encouraged, in this secret bower. Storch forced his way between them and collapsed on the corroded metal face of the gate, unable to take another step. It looked like nothing so much as a bathtub drain set into the stone, but he could find no seams or hinges. Perhaps it was not a gate, but a barricade, designed never to open. It was better fortified than the one Keyes had so much trouble opening.
The metal was warm to the touch. He could feel something stirring just on the other side, vibrating the gate with the same subtle but fundamental rhythm he'd heard in the ocean.
Storch tried to pry it open, forcing his fingertips into anything that looked like a crack until blood made his fingers too slick to get traction. Think. No, want it, but don't think. Let it happen. Your body will know what to do.
Except it didn't.
"Ubbo-Sathla," Storch whispered. "Mana Yood Sushai. Magna Mater. Tiamat. Gaia. Maasauu. Geb. Abhoth."
Nothing stirred below.
Something hacked into him just above his kidneys. It felt like an axe. He tried to roll, and another axe sank into his upper arm. Turning his head, he saw only a flurry of razor-sharp, chitinous knives rising and falling, cleaving and hacking his helpless, exhausted body.
It was something like an insect, something like a jellyfish that walked on telescoping, radially symmetrical legs, something like the fearsome gulper fish that lived miles beneath the ocean surface. Bit by bit, it chopped at him and sucked up the debris into a cluster of gnashing maws. He raised an arm to fend it off, but a wicked stinger jabbed him, and almost immediately, a cyst raised on his forearm and burst, spilling out blood and blue, glowing caviar.
Storch struggled to get out from under it, but it moved too fast, impaling his legs. Storch caught one of its scythe-claws and tore it out of its socket, turned it on the creature, but it was no use. The blade clattered off its hard shell without making a dent.
It explained a lot, in the end, to know he was meant to fail. It was a stupid mistake, the one he'd made again and again, to come here. Trusting in something bigger than himself. Pray to God, and a dumb fucking bug comes instead—
There was a deafening report, and the predator was swatted out of the air by a brilliant flash and a concussion that left Storch thinking they'd both been struck by lightning. That's what blaspheming gets you, his father's words came to him over the ringing of all the bells.
Someone stood over him. At this point, it didn't matter who it was, but he still was surprised to see it was Dyson.
He and Dr. Teeth appeared to have come to some sort of mutual understanding, a posture of live and let live gone horribly awry. The giant nematode had grown faster than ever on the rich foodstuffs between Dyson's ears. It looked like a great, gray, slimy anaconda, winding in and out of Dyson's eye socket and ears and countless weeping holes in his neck and chest. The endless snarl twisted and went into one hole, spilled out of another, but Dyson didn't seem to mind. He regarded Storch blankly with his remaining eye. In his feverishly shaking talons, he held the tank killer.
"My war is forever," he growled, saluted, and disappeared into the jungle.
Storch couldn't get up off the gate. He was too weak to fight or to pray, anymore, too weak to do anything but lie there and wait for whatever was going to happen.
He'd been a fool not to believe them when they told him the worst, and then, in the end, he'd been the biggest fool of all to believe that there was a higher authority, even a blind, mindless womb, to call to. They were all alone in the dark with the monsters, and it was the monsters' world all along, we just lived on it, but not for much longer, and that, at least, was a relief.
Somewhere in the jungle, Dyson shouted and fired the tank killer again and again. The ground shook, spore-pouches burst and showered Storch with luminous fairy-dust. The air shivered with his triumphant roar.
Storch called out again, his voice a strangled wheeze he could barely hear in his own head. Streams of sweat and rivulets of blood from his countless wounds rained down and pooled on the barrier, seeping through invisible cracks and disappearing.
This was stupid. God damn it. Goddamn you, God—
Something groaned, deep down in the earth.
Oh, you like that? he thought. Fine, you're God. You made us all in nobody's image, and then deserted us, so I guess that makes you the Almighty. You're the one, God damn you, you're God. If you're down there, if you're the author of us all, then come up and fix this.
All those other stupid names, all those invocations and shit that Armitage fed him, had done nothing. Now, he gave it the name by which he had loved and feared and believed in life, though it seemed like a symptom of his father's craziness. He gave it his anger, his pain, his hate, his blood and sweat. Bleeding and shouting curses into a hole in the ground, he gave it worship.
The gate bulged under him and burst open.
Storch was thrown against a tree. The soft meat of the trunk gave way beneath him, and he rolled back, almost falling over the edge into the pit he'd opened. Weak, more than halfway dead, he craned his neck and peered over the edge and down into the shaft.
For just a moment, there was only the darkness, a limitless, tangible shadow that went down to the heart of the world. Then he heard it coming. His body lurched back and somehow found its feet, carried him far from the sound that rolled up out of the shaft, growing louder by the second as something rose up to the opening.
Storch broke out of the trees and into the clearing. Keyes still stood before the shattered Elder tower. Its enormous compound body now resembled a crude, colossal image of the proto-crinoid thing it had devoured. Monstrous wings battered the air, and its wriggling eye-stalks swiveled to take in its domain. Its deafening ululations fell off at once as the sound of the Unbegotten Source grew louder and louder, filling the cavern of Eden with the roar of a wave approaching through a narrow cataract. Storch could feel it coming in the subtle shift of pressure in the cavern, and turned and ran back up the flattened track to the gate to the outside world.
It came.
Storch froze. Even if it meant his death, he could not take another step or turn away from what came up behind him, not until he'd witnessed it with his own eyes.
A geyser of glowing, opalescent foam erupted out of the hole. Wherever it touched, the trees burst. The mounting gusher spawned roving packs of cunning tsunami waves, rolling out in all directions and engulfing all in their path. Seething black clouds of life boiled up into the air, but the wave reached up and swallowed them. It spilled into the clearing, racing across the open ground like mercury across glass. A thrusting wave of it flanked Keyes, sweeping away the path to the exit. The colossal Shoggoth beat its enormous wings and lifted itself up on its pseudopods and tried to wade across the deluge. The flood turned and converged on it with savage prescience, lapping at its boneless limbs and undermining the earth it stood upon.
Storch was helpless to move, even when the waves seemed to notice him and approached, poised and glowing with blind, molecular lust. Its vitality was almost a voice in Storch's brain, the one word of the Unbegotten Source. It wanted to fuck him to death and make the world over with demigod monsters, a million rolling genetic dice sure, someday, to give the Great Womb what it longed for.
It shimmered and shifted in the blue spore-light, and Storch was able to see that it was anything but a homogenous fluid. The worst part of it was that it was exactly what it looked like. The fluid was alive with quivering, questing things like bullets, like fetal fish—sperm.
Keyes toppled and
fell into the flood. Wherever it touched the Shoggoth, the fluid went berserk, seeming to tear into its flesh and bear off chunks of it, but it was not destruction. It was generation on a scale and at a rate that defied all biology. The wriggling, churning inhabitants of the fluid leapt out of the flood at Keyes like spawn-mad salmon, and bored in. Keyes's mountainous flesh exploded with cysts not unlike the one the predator-bug had tried to put into Storch, but each of these ruptured almost instantly, every single cell a zygote, a fertile womb. Keyes was completely obscured by the rising tide of divine semen and newborn life that erupted forth and commenced the cycle all over again. With a speed and ferocity that shamed the most aggressive breeders of Eden, the chimerical sons and daughters of the Unbegotten Source rampaged across Keyes's paralyzed mass, eating and killing and raping each other, laying eggs and dying, evolving before Storch's eyes into every conceivable variation on the theme of a living creature, into monstrous, obscene and magnificent combinations of traits reptilian, avian, amphibian, bacterial, piscine, insectoid, mammalian and much that was impossible to classify.
And from out of the conflagration came a deafening shriek of wordless rage and betrayal that burst the air asunder and jammed the needle-shards of it deep into Storch's brain. Two hundred fifty million years of brooding, fifty years of scheming, all its ruthless machinations to save the world from itself, had come to this. With agonizing slowness, it subsided to a piteous howl and finally, as the very flesh that gave voice to the cry was consumed or impregnated, died out among the cacophony of its abominable larval offspring.
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