New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (69 page)

Tears welled from Maureen’s huge globular eyes. She had always known this was coming to her! Yes she had! Not out of pride, but because she had always taken the teachings of her church to heart, had always done the right thing, had walked steadfastly on the higher path.

Now the foliage yielded to a deep bare gully, an incision up the flank of the bluff. Ahead there in its blade-shaped pool of shadow, was her mate: a mottled, muscled sheen toiling toward the apex of the fissure. The gibbous moon peeked in up there to show his goal: a muddy seam in the clay not unlike her own cloacum.

There lay her re-birth. Her life unending! She climbed in awe. Her mate thrust himself into the fissure, his great bulk smoothly, incredibly received by the dense earth, till shortly only his herculean hind legs were visible. They pistoned once, twice—and he had vanished into the cliff side.

Maureen’s heart took wing. She leapt forward, but was still some thirty yards short of her own apotheosis, when something small and snarling hurtled down upon her from the gully’s rim. Agony collided with her left eye, and tiny teeth tore at it. This dwarfish but excruciating assault severely trauma-ed her ecstatic soul. She seized the attacker in her foreclaws—a tiny dog!—and crushed its life out, even as she thrashed and rolled side to side, battering the walls of the gully in her pain.

It caused a kind of rapture, to see the Impossible so plainly. As Maxie watched the huge amphibian claw its way into the earth, something stirred far away inside her, a primitive jubilation in her soul. It was true! The life in her exulted to know for a fact that the universe was a miracle in progress.

And then she realized there was another monster, following the first one up the gorge. In her rapture she rose to her feet—all three of them were standing, as if they were invisible, looking on from another world. There was a commotion in the grass at Maxie’s feet, and suddenly there was Ramses, a stripe of moonlight across the last glimpse of him Maxie ever saw, diving into the dark, his little fangs bared. The dauntless whippet plunged straight down upon one of the second monster’s eyes!

The brute thrashed explosively, down there in its darkness, its glossy hide flashing in its throes. “Ramses,” Maxie whispered, seeing her little friend killed then, stepping to the gully’s extreme brink.

Up where the first brute had penetrated, the moonlit earth moved. The clay tremored, and the seam in it spread, and from this aperture, a geyser of glittering flesh erupted into the moonlight. An immense tongue leapt ninety feet down the gorge and snatched back from it, and into the moonlight, the titan toad that seemed titanic no longer: the brute Ramses had died defending her from was mummied in tongue up to its eyes. The moonlight flashed on the trail of blood that glittered from its wounded eye, and then it was snatched peremptorily into the cliffside.

In a dim green light, in an immense cavern within the cliff, Maureen—so silkenly bandaged in tongue, like a fetus undelivered!—was lifted higher, higher, to hang above an alien planet, a single cyclopean Eye. Its pupil was a tarn of absolute black, ringed with a thin golden iris. The black void fractionally contracted as it studied her, making the pupil seem like an unearthly maw taking tiny bites of her.

And perhaps this was the mouth that spoke to her, for its words murmured stickily in the very center of her mind:

All you’ve seen and done is mine. All you know I will forever know.

And then Maureen was snatched into a different cavern, a Carlsbad of unearthly flesh, where a sunless sea of acids foamed.

There followed a dreadful passage for Maureen, a purgatory really. Wherein she swam in acid in perfect darkness. Wherein her meat and her blood and her bones turned to smoke, and drifted away from her thrashing and astonished soul.

But then she was whole and calm. She was cleansed. Was purely and only her own immortal soul! In fact, she was Reborn, as her pastor had always promised! And all her memories, all her feelings, were still minutely, eternally hers, delivered out of the body’s griefs and woes.

For an immeasurable time she lay in this blissful revelation. But gradually, a tiny question kindled. Why was Eternity so dark?

But no. No, it was not dark exactly. Dimly intricate visions swarmed round her, dizzying glimpses that her reaching thought could touch in all directions. Dear God! There was a multitude around her. No darkness this, but a matrix of other souls. Wherever she turned, she met a streaming traffic, a mob of other minds.

Wonder filled her, followed by the remotest little tingle of unease. This wasn’t exactly like paradise. Wasn’t it a bit more like being stored in a tank? Maureen struggled to understand the Benign Intent here.

Perhaps the fault was hers. Yes. She was supposed to reach out completely, to participate in her apotheosis. She must really look about her. Really commune with her angelic company.

And when she really reached, dear God, she found a wealth indeed! She entered an astonishingly detailed landscape, sunsets on planets unknown, wars fought in alien bodies, unspeakable grapplings of these indescribable bodies. Entered grieving reminiscences, entered the beloved winds of a carven ice world where wolvish beings skated on paws of polished bone and exultingly drank moonlight forever gone, entered amoebic manta-rays winging like gossamer through maroon oceans of methane, balletically copulating within a gas-giant home world forever gone, entered long- fingered saurians, graceful as butterflies on water wings like great ribbed fans, farming the continental shelves of amber seas forever gone.

And suddenly she heard, understood the ghostly tumult of remembered voices arising from this multitude. It was a stentorian chorus of woe everlasting.

As this understanding dawned, an alteration moved through this whole mosaic of pent minds. An impalpable wave arose, and its front was sweeping towards her and seized her. She was lifted, was hung in an acid bath of searing light, and every instant of her sixty-five years flashed through her, was lived again in one unending moment. And with her own life, all the lives she had collected were also evoked within that searching illumination—King, Wyatt, Eve, the little jogger, the kicking cop—each intricate detail of their being flowered in her devourer’s possessive gaze.

And then Maureen subsided again into that vast anonymity of captured lives, that universal hubbub of unsleeping memories.

Now she understood. Now Maureen knew it all. Oh, how they had lied in that church of hers! How blackly and solemnly and piously her Pastor had lied! This was not an eternity in glory! This was not a Beneficent God!

The sun was well up. They sat on a slope below the Legion of Honor, backs leaning against different sides of a cedar’s trunk. They had fallen asleep in these postures some time near dawn, and now awake, they still sat silent for a long time, gazing into space. At length Dee sighed, and took out her battered gray book. “Margold says some things about Tsathoggua.” She turned pages. ”Yes. Here, right after this passage about Dagon. I told you I’ve seen Dagon myself, or part of him.” She read aloud. “ ‘Dagon has cruised our world before, came up into the Sunless Sea beneath the Mountains of Madness and fed upon the Elder Race, and in another eon he dived from the skies upon Earth in the ancient Deluge that drowned it, and swam in those storm-tormented waters, snatching into his jaws the flood-doomed nations clawing at the surface, clinging to their rafts and spars and shards.’ ”

Silence fell. Dee’s eyes were somewhere else.

Maxie prompted, “That’s Dagon.”

“Yes.”

“And Tsathoggua?”

Dee blinked. Again she read aloud. “ ‘But of these Titans, Tsathoggua’s is the deepest, most chthonic hunger. His meal is meat and minds. The populations he’s plundered seethe in his belly, time without end, their spirits intact, a mighty choir of woeful souls, each life a self-knowing cell of the toad-god’s entrails, wherein the greedy movement of their devourer’s mind sweeps through them, as Tsathoggua, again and again, relishes each life individually, like a miser gloating on his hoard.”

They sat propped against the tree as on an axis of sanity, remembering the night just past. A very old tomcat stepped out of the bushes: tattered ears, shabby white fur with tabby patches, he came up slowly but purposefully, mere locomotion clearly enough work for him that he wasted no energy on cautious approaches. Came up to Maxie and stood looking at her.

“I wonder if he likes cheese,” she said, dubious. Cats weren’t her animal. She peeled open a cheese-and-cracker packet from her knapsack.

“Cats love it,” Leon said.

This one seemed to. And it turned out he didn’t mind Ramses’ bed-box either, nor the rattle of the cart, once he realized he could lie safely at ease in it and look around. He had very scrutinizing yellow eyes. Maxie, looking back into them, was thinking, Why not? He needs a friend.

It was a long walk to Pete’s, but no one objected to it as a destination. None of them thought of separating, of being alone with what they had seen.

The bar was empty, and Pete agreed to let her park her cart in the back corridor to the restrooms, so the cat wouldn’t be startled into running off. Not a word was said of Ramses—Pete appeared to understand.

They took a table, three doubles, and a pitcher of beer. They drank in sips, looking into one another’s eyes from time to time, wordlessly, just confirming what they had seen last night, what they sat there still seeing, again and again.

In walked Vera, purposeful, climbed a stool and pointed at the bar in front of her with a look at Pete. Swiveled the stool and sat looking thoughtfully at Maxie and her two new friends. Maxie gestured her over, but Vera stayed on her perch.

“I was just over at Butler looking for you,” Vera said. “Big to-do. Copcars in the parking lot. Down in the laundry room this morning? Still dark? That Dawg and his twin, that Carne creep. They were clocking smack down there—Community Market night down in the laundry, right? You know that Ramon asshole from up on four? Well he said he was goin’ down to do laundry, but of course he was goin’ down to cop was what it was. He told the cops when he went in, he saw some big animal eating Dawg! Eating him whole! And Carne nowhere in sight—just one of his kicked-off shoes!”

No one said anything, though behind the bar, Pete’s hands froze for a moment on the glass he was polishing. Vera gazed with dawning surprise at the unsurprised gazes of the three tired old folks staring at her from the table.

Leon said, “You ought to come over, sit here with us, miss. Set here by me why doncha?” Maxie and Dee looked at him. In the bony terrain visible behind his great shaggy mustaches and eyebrows, they were amazed to discern an attempt at suavity on Leon’s part.

The four of them talked for a considerable while, during which Pete gave up on the glasses and just leaned there on his bar, listening to them. A short silence followed.

“I think I’ll have to move out,” Maxie mused.

“Move in with me,” Dee said. “A room to yourself, though you might share sometimes with my young friend Scat. We should all be drawing together anyway. All of us who know.”

Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity—never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth . . . and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos.

“The Whisperer in Darkness” · H.P. Lovecraft (1930)

The motto of all the mongoose family is “Run and find out’’ . . .

“Rikki-tikki-tavi” · Rudyard Kipling (1894)

• MONGOOSE •

Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

Izrael Irizarry stepped through a bright-scarred airlock onto Kadath Station, lurching a little as he adjusted to station gravity. On his shoulder, Mongoose extended her neck, her barbels flaring, flicked her tongue out to taste the air, and colored a question. Another few steps, and he smelled what Mongoose smelled, the sharp stink of toves, ammoniac and bitter. 

He touched the tentacle coiled around his throat with the quick double tap that meant
soon
. Mongoose colored displeasure, and Irizarry stroked the slick velvet wedge of her head in consolation and restraint. Her four compound and twelve simple eyes glittered and her color softened, but did not change, as she leaned into the caress. She was eager to hunt and he didn’t blame her. The boojum
Manfred von Richthofen
took care of its own vermin. Mongoose had had to make do with a share of Irizarry’s rations, and she hated eating dead things.

If Irizarry could smell toves, it was more than the “minor infestation” the message from the station master had led him to expect. Of course, that message had reached Irizarry third or fourth or fifteenth hand, and he had no idea how long it had taken. Perhaps when the station master had sent for him, it had been minor.

But he knew the ways of bureaucrats, and he wondered.

People did double-takes as he passed, even the heavily-modded Christian cultists with their telescoping limbs and biolin eyes. You found them on every station and steelships too, though mostly they wouldn’t work the boojums. Nobody liked Christians much, but they could work in situations that would kill an unmodded human or a even a gilly, so captains and station masters tolerated them.

There were a lot of gillies in Kadath’s hallways, and they all stopped to blink at Mongoose. One, an indenturee, stopped and made an elaborate hand-flapping bow. Irizarry felt one of Mongoose’s tendrils work itself through two of his earrings. Although she didn’t understand staring exactly—her compound eyes made the idea alien to her—she felt the attention and was made shy by it.

Unlike the boojum-ships they serviced, the stations—Providence, Kadath, Leng, Dunwich, and the others—were man-made. Their radial symmetry was predictable, and to find the station master, Irizarry only had to work his way inward from the
Manfred von Richthofen
’s dock to the hub. There he found one of the inevitable safety maps (you are here; in case of decompression, proceed in an orderly manner to the life vaults located here, here, or here) and leaned close to squint at the tiny lettering. Mongoose copied him, tilting her head first one way, then another, though flat representations meant nothing to her. He made out S
TATION
M
ASTER’S
O
FFICE
finally, on a oval bubble, the door of which was actually in sight.

“Here we go, girl,” he said to Mongoose (who, stone-deaf though she was, pressed against him in response to the vibration of his voice). He hated this part of the job, hated dealing with apparatchiks and functionaries, and of course the Station Master’s office was full of them, a receptionist, and then a secretary, and then someone who was maybe the
other
kind of secretary, and then finally—Mongoose by now halfway down the back of his shirt and entirely hidden by his hair and Irizarry himself half stifled by memories of someone he didn’t want to remember being—he was ushered into an inner room where Station Master Lee, her arms crossed and her round face set in a scowl, was waiting. 

“Mr. Irizarry,” she said, unfolding her arms long enough to stick one hand out in a facsimile of a congenial greeting.

He held up a hand in response, relieved to see no sign of recognition in her face. It was Irizarry’s experience that dead lives were best left lie where they fell. “Sorry, Station Master,” he said. “I can’t.”

He thought of asking her about the reek of toves on the air, if she understood just how bad the situation had become. People could convince themselves of a lot of bullshit, given half a chance.

Instead, he decided to talk about his partner. “Mongoose hates it when I touch other people. She gets jealous, like a parrot.”

“The cheshire’s here?” She let her hand drop to her side, the expression on her face a mixture of respect and alarm. “Is it out of phase?”

Well, at least Station Master Lee knew a little more about cheshire-cats than most people. “No,” Irizarry said. “She’s down my shirt.”

Half a standard hour later, wading through the damp bowels of a ventilation pore, Irizarry tapped his rebreather to try to clear some of the tove-stench from his nostrils and mouth. It didn’t help much; he was getting close.

Here, Mongoose wasn’t shy at all. She slithered up on top of his head, barbels and graspers extended to full length, pulsing slowly in predatory greens and reds. Her tendrils slithered through his hair and coiled about his throat, fading in and out of phase. He placed his fingertips on her slick-resilient hide to restrain her. The last thing he needed was for Mongoose to go spectral and charge off down the corridor after the tove colony.

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t come back, because she would—but that was only if she didn’t get herself into more trouble than she could get out of without his help. “Steady,” he said, though of course she couldn’t hear him. A creature adapted to vacuum had no ears. But she could feel his voice vibrate in his throat, and a tendril brushed his lips, feeling the puff of air and the shape of the word. He tapped her tendril twice again—
soon
—and felt it contract. She flashed hungry orange in his peripheral vision. She was experimenting with jaguar rosettes—they had had long discussions of jaguars and tigers after their nightly reading of Pooh on the
Manfred von Richthofen
, as Mongoose had wanted to know what jagulars and tiggers were. Irizarry had already taught her about mongooses, and he’d read
Alice in Wonderland
so she would know what a Cheshire Cat was. Two days later—he still remembered it vividly—she had disappeared quite slowly, starting with the tips of the long coils of her tail and tendrils and ending with the needle-sharp crystalline array of her teeth. And then she’d phased back in, all excited aquamarine and pink, almost bouncing, and he’d praised her and stroked her and reminded himself not to think of her as a cat. Or a mongoose.

She had readily grasped the distinction between jaguars and jagulars, and had almost as quickly decided that she was a jagular; Irizarry had almost started to argue, but then thought better of it. She was, after all, a Very Good Dropper. And nobody ever saw her coming unless she wanted them to.

When the faint glow of the toves came into view at the bottom of the pore, he felt her shiver all over, luxuriantly, before she shimmered dark and folded herself tight against his scalp. Irizarry doused his own lights as well, flipping the passive infrared goggles down over his eyes. Toves were as blind as Mongoose was deaf, but an infestation this bad could mean the cracks were growing large enough for bigger things to wiggle through, and if there were raths, no sense in letting the monsters know he was coming.

He tapped the tendril curled around his throat three times, and whispered “Go.” She didn’t need him to tell her twice; really, he thought wryly, she didn’t need him to tell her at all. He barely felt her featherweight disengage before she was gone down the corridor as silently as a hunting owl. She was invisible to his goggles, her body at ambient temperature, but he knew from experience that her barbels and vanes would be spread wide, and he’d hear the shrieks when she came in among the toves.

The toves covered the corridor ceiling, arm-long carapaces adhered by a foul-smelling secretion that oozed from between the sections of their exoskeletons. The upper third of each tove’s body bent down like a dangling bough, bringing the glowing, sticky lure and flesh-ripping pincers into play. Irizarry had no idea what they fed on in their own phase, or dimension, or whatever.

Here, though, he knew what they ate. Anything they could get.

He kept his shock probe ready, splashing after, to assist her if it turned out necessary. That was sure a lot of toves, and even a cheshire-cat could get in trouble if she was outnumbered. Ahead of him, a tove warbled and went suddenly dark; Mongoose had made her first kill.

Within moments, the tove colony was in full warble, the harmonics making Irizarry’s head ache. He moved forward carefully, alert now for signs of raths. The largest tove colony he’d ever seen was on the derelict steelship
Jenny Lind
, which he and Mongoose had explored when they were working salvage on the boojum
Harriet Tubman
. The hulk had been covered inside and out with toves; the colony was so vast that, having eaten everything else, it had started cannibalizing itself, toves eating their neighbors and being eaten in turn. Mongoose had glutted herself before the Harriet Tubman ate the wreckage, and in the refuse she left behind, Irizarry had found the strange starlike bones of an adult rath, consumed by its own prey. The bandersnatch that had killed the humans on the
Jenny Lind
had died with her reactor core and her captain. A handful of passengers and crew had escaped to tell the tale.

He refocused. This colony wasn’t as large as those heaving masses on the
Jenny Lind
, but it was the largest he’d ever encountered not in a quarantine situation, and if there weren’t raths somewhere on Kadath Station, he’d eat his infrared goggles.

A dead tove landed at his feet, its eyeless head neatly separated from its segmented body, and a heartbeat later Mongoose phased in on his shoulder and made her deep clicking noise that meant,
Irizarry! Pay attention!

He held his hand out, raised to shoulder level, and Mongoose flowed between the two, keeping her bulk on his shoulder, with tendrils resting against his lips and larynx, but her tentacles wrapping around his hand to communicate. He pushed his goggles up with his free hand and switched on his belt light so he could read her colors.

She was anxious, strobing yellow and green.
Many,
she shaped against his palm, and then emphatically,
R
.

“R” was bad—it meant
rath
—but it was better than “B.” If a bandersnatch had come through, all of them were walking dead, and Kadath Station was already as doomed as the
Jenny Lind
. “Do you smell it?” he asked under the warbling of the toves.

Taste
, said Mongoose, and because Irizarry had been her partner for almost five Solar, he understood: the toves tasted of rath, meaning that they had recently been feeding on rath guano, and given the swiftness of toves’ digestive systems, that meant a rath was patrolling territory on the station.

Mongoose’s grip tightened on his shoulder.
R
, she said again.
R. R. R
.

Irizarry’s heart lurched and sank. More than one rath. The cracks were widening.

A bandersnatch was only a matter of time.

Station Master Lee didn’t want to hear it. It was all there in the way she stood, the way she pretended distraction to avoid eye-contact. He knew the rules of this game, probably better than she did. He stepped into her personal space. Mongoose shivered against the nape of his neck, her tendrils threading his hair. Even without being able to see her, he knew she was a deep, anxious emerald.

“A rath?” said Station Master Lee, with a toss of her head that might have looked flirtatious on a younger or less hostile woman, and moved away again. “Don’t be ridiculous. There hasn’t been a rath on Kadath Station since my grandfather’s time.”

“Doesn’t mean there isn’t an infestation now,” Irizarry said quietly. If she was going to be dramatic, that was his cue to stay still and calm. “And I said raths. Plural.”

“That’s even more ridiculous. Mr. Irizarry, if this is some ill-conceived attempt to drive up your price—”

“It isn’t.” He was careful to say it flatly, not indignantly. “Station Master, I understand that this isn’t what you want to hear, but you have to quarantine Kadath.”

“Can’t be done,” she said, her tone brisk and flat, as if he’d asked her to pilot Kadath through the rings of Saturn.

“Of course it can!” Irizarry said, and she finally turned to look at him, outraged that he dared to contradict her. Against his neck, Mongoose flexed one set of claws. She didn’t like it when he was angry.

Mostly, that wasn’t a problem. Mostly, Irizarry knew anger was a waste of time and energy. It didn’t solve anything. It didn’t fix anything. It couldn’t bring back anything that was lost. People, lives. The sorts of things that got washed away in the tides of time. Or were purged, whether you wanted them gone or not.

But this was . . . “You do know what a colony of adult raths can do, don’t you? With a contained population of prey? Tell me, Station Master, have you started noticing fewer indigents in the shelters?”

She turned away again, dismissing his existence from her cosmology. “The matter is not open for discussion, Mr. Irizarry. I hired you to deal with an alleged infestation. I expect you to do so. If you feel you can’t, you are of course welcome to leave the station with whatever ship takes your fancy. I believe the
Arthur Gordon Pym
is headed in-system, or perhaps you’d prefer the Jupiter run?”