Deep Roots

by Ruthanna Emrys

  “I’m sorry. I’ll ask.” I shook my head. “You wanted to talk about men of the air?”

  “Yes. I want to know how long you believe they’ll endure.”

  I shook my head. “There are events we believe still lie in humanity’s future. But we could be wrong—we could have missed them. Or they could be brief, empires that rise and fall in the space of a month, leaving a swift deep scar on history. There could be population crashes sufficient to drive us from the land—and once gone, we won’t be able to return.”

  “I don’t want an answer based on your patchy histories of the future. Based on your own observation.”

  It seemed hubristic to answer. “Men of the air are growing more dangerous to themselves. A moment of foolishness at the wrong time, or a moment of wisdom at the right, could decide between extinction and a million more years of history. But why are you asking me? You boast of seeing so many species live and die.”

  “It’s your species. The Deep Ones are eternal observers—from your limited vantage point, you see much.” A ripple of something painful on the edge of my vision. “The question is a point of contention among our colonists here. People on all sides cite the same points you do.”

  Freddy had told me to ask: “And what do you believe?”

  “That humanity is at risk, but can be saved.”

  I thought the same—but couldn’t believe we were in perfect accord. “Saved how? By whom?”

  “That depends. Maybe you can do it on your own. Maybe you need help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  Tentacles stretched and contracted. “What do you think you need?”

  Perhaps they were asking me because I was unprepared. I had enough power to make agreements, but was too inexperienced to avoid the perils. If I got nothing else out of this conversation, I was gaining experience. I parried the question. “You call us observers, but you claim to have been on Earth since before we painted caves. What do you see, that we might miss?”

  Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s body seemed to settle among spindled limbs. “There are the obvious danger signs, of course. Fission weapons, and fusion soon. The immediate destruction isn’t even the issue, so much as mutations to fragile genetic structures. Then there are the industrial scars: changes to air composition, temperature ranges, agricultural capacity. Humans can be responsible as individuals, but as a species you’ve no institutions to coordinate stewarding your ecology.”

  “We’re capable,” I said.

  “I think so. But these are the obvious threats—any species that wasn’t alarmed by them wouldn’t be smart enough to build them in the first place. If a species survives carbon-based industries and city-killer weapons, it’s by developing some method of stewardship. But that takes trust. And here, we have observed a pattern: you can predict such trust by how a species uses weaker magic. That’s where humans, on their own, fail.”

  “Men of the air barely use magic at all.” Perhaps that was the problem. For me, magical practice forced perspective, a patience that didn’t come naturally. For Caleb, who scarcely remembered a community before the camps, the confluence offered a bone-deep trust that his bitterness couldn’t smother.

  “But we’ve seen how you use it when you do,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. “Magic by its nature blurs the boundaries between individuals. The trapezohedron lets us share a thousand points of view, understanding that transcends any one set of senses. Every vision conveys what a real person sees, or once saw.”

  That view of R’lyeh, guards rising in response to … what? “One of you?”

  “Yes, but not the way you mean. Freddy is one of us, and Shelean, and all our travel-mates. Species is meaningless to our community.”

  I should not have, but— “You make no distinction between Outer Ones and captive minds?”

  “They’re no such thing.” I sought anger or amusement in Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s mild tone, but could read its voice no better than its body. “We share our abilities and knowledge willingly—that’s an end in itself, not just a side effect of some abstract search for knowledge.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend any offense.”

  Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt bent its head toward me, and I froze as tendrils whispered against my hair and pricked my forehead. “Most of the water’s people wouldn’t have—they think being a Yithian ‘captive’ a great honor. You’re more ambivalent.”

  I pulled back. “You were saying. About magic and boundaries.”

  “You illustrate the problem yourself. You flinch when I understand you too well—but I’ve been reading humans since long before you were born. You want to believe some boundaries too essential to blur. You choose to make the differences between us a barrier.”

  “You think humanity can’t avoid another war … because you make some of us uncomfortable?”

  “It’s one example. The blurring of boundaries that magic requires can build trust or destroy it—depending on how it’s understood, and used. After your first atomic explosion, we surveyed the species. Our standard practice. We sent emissaries across the world to study wizards skilled at sharing bodies or sensations, and witnesses of great and terrible workings. We learned that humans usually practice such arts to glorify individuals, not to understand each other. They break social bonds and fan paranoia.”

  “Wait.” My mind raced; I struggled to parse the core of what it had said from the larger implications. In January, investigating rumors that Russian agents had learned the secret of stealing bodies, we’d visited the last surviving witness of the last such crime I knew. We’d found him in Pickman Sanitarium, grown truly mad from his years there. And he’d mentioned earlier visitors who’d asked the same questions. “Were you the ones who asked Daniel Upton about body theft in Innsmouth?”

  “The name sounds familiar. Yes, among many others.”

  “That’s … a relief, after a fashion.”

  “Why?”

  “We knew someone had talked with him about it, but we didn’t know who, or what they wanted. We were worried that someone wanted to repeat Ephraim’s crime.”

  “And thus in trying to learn more, we added to your paranoia. I’m sorry. It’s difficult to avoid, once a species starts down that path.”

  Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s suggestions came perilously close to my own fears. Scant years after our latest world-shaking war, tensions were climbing again. Russia, once an ally, pushed into new territory; few other powers would countenance that for long. The mere suggestion of magical weapons in their arsenal had sparked answering American research. I still kept to myself the strongest evidence that their fears were well-founded. My people made body theft a capital crime for a reason: loyalty could too easily tear out its own throat, when every skin might hide an enemy.

  I couldn’t trust the Outer One. The oldest and wisest people I knew, whom I did trust, warned me against it. But like Barlow with his foolhardy experiments, the Outer Ones would act whether I offered them direction or no.

  It had said something earlier … I realized I was chewing my lip. “You mentioned ‘wizards.’ More than we knew about. You had some way to find out who was practicing those arts.” I tilted my head briefly toward Peters and Barlow. I suspected Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt could read my body language far better than I could read its. “Their paranoia runs deep, and it grows from a lack of knowledge. They see enemies everywhere if none make themselves obvious. If you have a spell, a device, that can tell for sure whether someone is truly themselves, that would be the best help you could offer. Barlow, and others like him, could know when they had nothing to fear.”

  Tentacles swept one direction, then the other—was it shaking its head? “We learn who practitioners are by long observation, and by reading minds. Our life-shaping arts are strong and well-practiced, but we can no more give you telepathy than wings.”

  “Oh.” The answer was disappointing, on multiple levels.

  “Those ones there—” Tentacles rippled toward Barlow. “You’ve spoken before of the power they wield
in fear. If they’re connected with leaders who share their fears, perhaps we can teach them better ways. I’d like to learn more—first from your testimony, and then I’ll speak with them directly.”

  “What do you want to know?” I tried to balance my caution with the chance of gaining something from this strange, exhausting week.

  “I want to share your perspective. The trapezohedron can not only provide understanding, but record it. What you’ve seen of these people’s fears could be invaluable. We could know them better, and others like them. Perhaps with that knowledge we could offer something that would ease their terror.”

  My first instinct was desire: on the trapezohedron’s altar was a chance to see R’lyeh again. My vision had been terrifying, compelling—and blood-deep reassurance that however difficult it might be to build Innsmouth, another home waited for me, solid and sure.

  But my gut yearning faded before sensible revulsion. Memory is precious and perilous. To share our journals with the Yith was a sacrament. To share my own perceptions with any lesser creature—especially with someone who might use my experiences now, for practical ends that I could not control—seemed more vulnerability than I should risk. My memories were full of secrets. Things I’d promised Spector never to share—even if the Outer Ones already knew them. Other secrets I held close for the sake of the world, or for a single friend.

  And yet, the dangers Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt described were real. Humanity walked a precipice. We tried to hold them back from the edge—as well as we could on our own, at great price. Weighed against the chance of giving my species another fraction of safety, almost any cost was meaningless.

  “Neko should come with me. She doesn’t practice magic herself, so she sees what we’ve done from a different perspective.” I couldn’t ask Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt about the threats Grandfather had mentioned—the suggestion of doppelgangers might infuriate them if mentioned aloud, whether rumor or truth. But I could ensure myself well-chaperoned, and by someone who wouldn’t object to the duty.

  I also knew Neko wouldn’t argue with my decision. I didn’t try to catch the elders’ attention before we left the room.

  * * *

  The shimmer of the altar room was still disorienting, but easier this time.

  “How do we do this?” asked Neko. She touched the altar gingerly. The metallic gray surface seemed an anchor in the shifting atmosphere.

  “Think on what you wish to share,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. It leaned its head over the carved box. “You need not visualize everything, only invoke the set of understandings. Let me know when you are ready.”

  I leaned back on the cushions and thought about Barlow and his team. An image came to me: polished shoes in the snow, as I lowered my eyes at gunpoint. Other flashes: Mary’s voice dissecting my brother’s desperate testimony, suggesting talismans for interrogation. The smell of Peters’s breath as he accused me of treason. A room etched with glowing gears. The rush of airless cold.

  Mary cradling a girl’s dead body.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  I braced myself, but the nausea was worse than I’d remembered. Every sense told me that something was wrong. Acid coated my tongue, ears cringed against a piercing shriek, fingers rubbed the raw edge of a pustulant wound. Then all died but vision and sound.

  I sat bound in a Miskatonic administrative office. A uniformed man tied a blindfold across my face. Fear and anger surged, muted by my absence of heartbeat and breath. I attended with all my effort to the voices around me, labeling for Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s benefit the people who called me a spy, trying to explain their motivations.

  Now I stood outside the library. A siren screamed. Around me, students exhaled fog into the night. By the great doors, Barlow approached the college president and head librarian. I thought about what he wanted in that building, how he’d exploit the commotion to steal books on forbidden arts.

  Then Barlow, Peters, Mary—and their stolen students—arrayed around a vast diagram in a basement lit only by candles. They insisted I explain my presence. I could not move, and could not feel the cold I knew was there—cold without which this scene made no sense. I struggled for comprehension, pushed the dissonance away, and tumbled paralyzed—

  To earlier terror, to guards training guns on a line of people with bulging eyes and thick necks, faces streaked by salt. One man wore a gold ring engraved with his wife’s name; they shoved gun barrels against his chest, demanded he remove it now now now—

  But the desert is nothing without heat, and I fell onto a beach, snow swirling around Trumbull and Mary as they discussed how to save my life. I couldn’t feel the cold—

  And then at last, wrestling with my own incomplete memories, I dove again into deep water. No city beckoned. Instead, through sight that drank in the least light and gathered heat, I saw the great vent. Hot-bright water streamed upward, a vast and deadly fountain. Life clustered: fungous cacti and lichen, poppy red. Long darting things with glowing spots along their sides, and fish thick with insulating fat. Scuttling crabs, utterly colorless, and an octopus with limbs like barren branches. Starry tentacles flowed from a conical shell.

  And there were elders. Webbed hands and feet, muscled limbs, crests furled against skulls, gills flared wide. They moved like dancers. They eased their way around the strange forms, which they examined with lens and talisman. Wards glowed softly, flaring with the power needed to filter the vent’s toxic gases.

  At the edge of vision something moved, too vast to take in. An eye blinked and vanished, and an elder looked up. I heard: kraken?

  Then I gasped with lungs suddenly real. Neko’s floral perfume filled my mouth. She leaned against me, taking shuddering breaths, head pressed into my shoulder.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m okay. Just need a minute. I was flying, I don’t think…”

  “That was unpleasant,” I said. Except for the last vision, the memory that hadn’t been mine. Had it been meant as trade? And if so, who had I traded with?

  “I saw,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. It returned the trapezohedron to the finely etched box, a hint of reverence in its movements. “Your FBI agents seem fickle allies, at best.”

  “It’s more accurate to call them fickle enemies. They help us only reluctantly.”

  Anemone movements stilled. Wing-tips quivered. “We should go back now. Your elders are frightened by your absence.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “Where did they take you?” demanded Grandfather. “They said you went willingly.”

  “As they always say,” added S’vlk.

  “I did,” I said. “I took Neko for a chaperone. And I came back. It’s barely been half an hour.”

  Grandfather grabbed my arm, shark-swift, and scratched my still-sore palm with his talon. I stifled a shriek. He wanted to be sure of me, and I couldn’t blame him. He tasted my blood and relaxed perceptibly. “It’s been near an hour since last I saw you. Neko, here.”

  “We’re fine, Ojiisan, I promise.” But she offered him her wrist, and received a gentler version of the same test. I couldn’t imagine how he’d distinguish her blood from any other man of the air, but the ritual seemed to reassure him.

  In R’lyehn, Grandfather continued. “Aphra, we’re among a pod of dolphins, smart and needle-sharp, and you swim off on your own. What were you thinking?”

  In English that question would have been rhetorical; in our tongue it demanded a blunt response. “I needed to do something dangerous, and knew you’d forbid it. So I made the safest choice I could and didn’t ask permission.”

  He heaved a sigh, hoarse with his hours out of water. “Aphra, I don’t have grandchildren to spare. Can’t you restrain your disobedience until you’re grown?”

  “The thing needed doing now.”

  “And this necessary, unspeakable danger…” prompted S’vlk.

  I managed to keep my eyes from Barlow’s team. They were still engrossed in conversation with a stack of canisters, but I didn’t want to risk their notice.<
br />
  “Our host wants to hold off humanity’s extinction. In my judgment, if I told it we needed no help, it would still act on its own. It sees the state’s fears as a threat. So do we. The Outer One”—I avoided names, assuming that any sapient would be attracted by their own—“asked to see my memories. They have a device—” S’vlk dropped to a crouch and hissed.

  When my own defensive reflexes flared, I could intimidate most men of the air. Now I froze, and Grandfather stiffened. Neko’s hands flew to her mouth. “S’vlk-sama,” she whispered.

  “You do not let them touch your mind,” said S’vlk. “Yringl’phtagn, we must leave, now. Your granddaughter is in danger.”

  “But we—” I gestured helplessly at the conversation pit, where my confluence and the FBI agents sat engrossed in a dozen conversations.

  “Khur S’vlk,” said Grandfather. “It’s full daylight out there, and a thousand mortals between us and the sea.”

  “We’ll ford that current,” she said, “after we escape their influence. I am being patient, I am biding my time, but we’ll lose everything if I’m the only one who takes this danger seriously.”

  I stared, frozen now by uncertainty rather than fear. S’vlk had a long history with the Outer Ones. She might well know more about the trapezohedron than I did. She was also frightened and driven by rage. And in my experience—admittedly much briefer than hers—fleeing anything other than the immediate threat of destruction merely invited pursuit.

  “We can leave,” I said. “But not without a plan. You know how dangerous Outer Ones can be, but I know how dangerous modern men of the air are. Step outside uncloaked in daylight, and someone will shoot you.”

  “My stubborn granddaughter is right,” said Grandfather. “Aphra, obey me this time. Gather your people, and we’ll decide what’s to be done.”

  This, at least, was easy, even if it took long minutes during which I constantly glanced at S’vlk for signs of erupting impatience. And, my own fear summoned by hers, at the Outer Ones for signs that they might object to our departure.