New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Part 29

In the deepest corner of the woods, within a grotto of gray stone, sprawled an ancient shrine overgrown with rotting ferns. Brose set his statue on the ground, and we settled down to wait.

I don't know how many hours we lay there. Then a breeze came, s.n.a.t.c.hing up damp leaves and flinging them about, raising them into columns in the sky. The wind blew faster and louder until it seemed to shriek in pain.

I was struck by a maddening sense of dislocation, a nightmare cacophony of unbearable sensations. Then the shadows leapt from beneath the trees to block out the starlight and wrap themselves around our throats and sink behind our eyes.

The Traveler on Oceans of Night was there, his form stretching upward to infinity. All of him was far away yet somehow pressing close all around us. He was so enormous, so horrible, and so magnificent that we collapsed and wept helplessly and without shame to behold Him.

Through the confusion came the voice of Brose screaming, "Bind yourselves! Do it now!"

Adrian was first. He rose off the ground, arms outstretched, robe whipping about him, face full of ecstasy. One by one my cla.s.smates lifted from the earth until they circled around that great being. They were like flies, I realized suddenly. Like flies rising from the rot to swirl around Professor Carlton Brose.

I looked at him, and his expression was one I had come to know too well: Indifference. Something was horribly wrong. I imagined I saw that same indifference mirrored on the incomprehensible otherworldly face of the Traveler.

I would not bind to Him. I crawled until I found a rock to hide behind, then I screamed to my whirling cla.s.smates, "We're the flies! Oh G.o.d, we're like the flies."

The Traveler made one ponderous motion with a million of His slimy tentacles, and He stepped away toward another star, another dimension, another world He had dreamed. Then the night was silent and empty.

Brose strode toward me. He said darkly, "You failed the binding."

I lunged at him, startling him. I grabbed his throat and forced him down against a stone.

"You lied," I said. "You said you'd make us His disciples."

"The Traveler on Oceans of Night is a great vessel," he whispered. "I would put you aboard."

"As what?" I said. "A rat in the hold? Or rather, a flea on a rat."

I imagined I saw the dozen bodies of my cla.s.smates, sucked away into the bitter black void between worlds, their frozen forms twirling slowly in an endless dance among the stars.

Then Brose seized my temples with his muddy fingers and made me look down into his cold, tombstone eyes. My own eyes began to bleed. I knew he meant to kill me.

As I flailed, my fingers fell upon the statue, and I lifted it with two arms and brought it down on Brose's forehead. The statue sank without resistance until it reached the ground. When I pulled it away there was nothing but a gaping hole where the face of Professor Carlton Brose had been.

The empty eyes of the Traveler could see things that humans never dreamt of, but He was blind to the pain of this sad world.

You were the best, Adrian, better than me. Better at a lie. Are you proud?

Today a student came to beg admission to my special program. He stood at the fish tank and clenched a mouse in his fist. Then he held it underwater until it drowned.

"Congratulations," I said. "You've been accepted."

He smiled.

I do this initiation-as I'm sure Brose did-to ease my conscience, to rea.s.sure myself that my students are cruel, and deserve their fate.

The college hates the program, but they know it's necessary, and after Brose died I was the only one who could replace him. New England has some dangerous people lurking about-ones who've latched onto darkness, or might-and they need to be dealt with. The harmless ones I turn away.

I've learned the truth that Brose knew: it's best to be a big fish in a small pond. Fish can't live outside the pond, and being a fish isn't so bad. Every spring, before I send them off to die, a new cla.s.s studies with me. They are enthralled by my meager powers. They long for my briefest attention.

They adore me.

Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep, Heedless of all the cries I make, And down the nether pits to that foul lake Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.

"Fungi from Yuggoth:.

XX. Night Gaunts" H.P. Lovecraft (1930).

* SHOGGOTHS IN BLOOM *

Elizabeth Bear.

"Well, now, Professor Harding," the fisherman says, as his Bluebird skips across Pen.o.bscot Bay, "I don't know about that. The jellies don't trouble with us, and we don't trouble with them."

He's not much older than forty, but wizened, his hands work-roughened and his face reminiscent of saddle-leather, in texture and in hue. Professor Harding's age, and Harding watches him with concealed interest as he works the Bluebird's engine. He might be a veteran of the Great War, as Harding is.

He doesn't mention it. It wouldn't establish camaraderie: they wouldn't have fought in the same units or watched their buddies die in the same trenches.

That's not the way it works, not with a Maine fisherman who would shake his head and not extend his hand to shake, and say, between pensive chaws on his tobacco, "Doctor Harding? Well, huh. I never met a colored professor before," and then shoot down all of Harding's attempts to open conversation about the near-riots provoked by a fantastical radio drama about an alien invasion of New York City less than a fortnight before.

Harding's own hands are folded tight under his armpits so the fisherman won't see them shaking. He's lucky to be here. Lucky anyone would take him out. Lucky to have his tenure-track position at Wilberforce, which he is risking right now.

The bay is as smooth as a mirror, the Bluebird's wake cutting it like a stroke of chalk across slate. In the peach-sorbet light of sunrise, a cl.u.s.ter of rocks glistens. The boulders themselves are black, bleak, sea-worn and ragged. But over them, the light refracts through a translucent layer of jelly, mounded six feet deep in places, glowing softly in the dawn. Rising above it, the stalks are evident as opaque silhouettes, each nodding under the weight of a fruiting body.

Harding catches his breath. It's beautiful. And deceptively still, for whatever the weather may be, beyond the calm of the bay, across the splintered gray Atlantic, farther than Harding-or anyone-can see, a storm is rising in Europe.

Harding's an educated man, well-read, and he's the grandson of Nathan Harding, the buffalo soldier. An African-born ex-slave who fought on both sides of the Civil War, when Grampa Harding was sent to serve in his master's place, he deserted, and lied, and stayed on with the Union army after.

Like his grandfather, Harding was a soldier. He's not a historian, but you don't have to be to see the signs of war.

"No contact at all?" he asks, readying his borrowed Leica camera.

"They clear out a few pots," the fisherman says, meaning lobster pots. "But they don't damage the pot. Just flow around it and digest the lobster inside. It's not convenient." He shrugs. It's not convenient, but it's not a threat either. These Yankees never say anything outright if they think you can puzzle it out from context.

"But you don't try to do something about the shoggoths?"

While adjusting the richness of the fuel mixture, the fisherman speaks without looking up. "What could we do to them? We can't hurt them. And lord knows, I wouldn't want to get one's ire up."

"Sounds like my department head," Harding says, leaning back against the gunwale, feeling like he's taking an enormous risk. But the fisherman just looks at him curiously, as if surprised the talking monkey has the ambition or the audacity to joke.

Or maybe Harding's just not funny. He sits in the bow with folded hands, and waits while the boat skips across the water.

The perfect sunrise strikes Harding as symbolic. It's taken him five years to get here-five years, or more like his entire life since the War. The sea-swept rocks of the remote Maine coast are habitat to a panoply of colorful creatures. It's an opportunity, a little-studied maritime ecosystem. This is in part due to difficulty of access and in part due to the perils inherent in close contact with its rarest and most spectacular denizen: Oracupoda horibilis, the common surf shoggoth.

Which, after the fas.h.i.+on of common names, is neither common nor p.r.o.ne to linger in the surf. In fact, O. horibilis is never seen above the water except in the late autumn. Such authors as mention them a.s.sume the shoggoths heave themselves on remote coastal rocks to bloom and breed.

Reproduction is a possibility, but Harding isn't certain it's the right answer. But whatever they are doing, in this state, they are torpid, unresponsive. As long as their integument is not ruptured, releasing the gelatinous digestive acid within, they may be approached in safety.

A mature specimen of O. horibilis, at some fifteen to twenty feet in diameter and an estimated weight in excess of eight tons, is the largest of modern shoggoths. However, the admittedly fragmentary fossil record suggests the prehistoric shoggoth was a much larger beast. Although only two fossilized casts of prehistoric shoggoth tracks have been recovered, the oldest exemplar dates from the Precambrian period. The size of that single prehistoric specimen, of a species provisionally named Oracupoda antediluvius, suggests it was made an animal more than triple the size of the modern O. horibilis.

And that spectacular living fossil, the jeweled or common surf shoggoth, is half again the size of the only other known species-the black Adriatic shoggoth, O. dermadentata, which is even rarer and more limited in its range.

"There," Harding says, pointing to an outcrop of rock. The shoggoth or shoggoths-it is impossible to tell, from this distance, if it's one large individual or several merged midsize ones-on the rocks ahead glisten like jelly confections. The fisherman hesitates, but with a long almost-silent sigh, he brings the Bluebird around. Harding leans forward, looking for any sign of intersection, the flat plane where two shoggoths might be pressed up against one another. It ought to look like the rainbowed border between conjoined soap bubbles.

Now that the sun is higher, and at their backs-along with the vast reach of the Atlantic-Harding can see the animal's colors. Its body is a deep sea green, reminiscent of hunks of broken gla.s.s as sold at aquarium stores. The tendrils and k.n.o.bs and fruiting bodies covering its dorsal surface are indigo and violet. In the sunlight, they dazzle, but in the depths of the ocean the colors are perfect camouflage, tentacles waving like patches of algae and weed.

Unless you caught it moving, you'd never see the translucent, dappled monster before it engulfed you.

"Professor," the fisherman says. "Where do they come from?"

"I don't know," Harding answers. Salt spray itches in his close-cropped beard, but at least the beard keeps the sting of the wind off his cheeks. The leather jacket may not have been his best plan, but it too is warm. "That's what I'm here to find out."

Genus Oracupoda are unusual among animals of their size in several particulars. One is their lack of anything that could be described as a nervous system. The animal is as bereft of nerve nets, ganglia, axons, neurons, dendrites, and glial cells as an oak. This apparent contradiction-animals with even simplified nervous systems are either large and immobile or, if they are mobile, quite small, like a starfish-is not the only interesting thing about a shoggoth.

And it is that second thing that justifies Harding's visit. Because Oracupoda's other, lesser-known peculiarity is apparent functional immortality. Like the Maine lobster to whose fisheries they return to breed, shoggoths do not die of old age. It's unlikely that they would leave fossils, with their gelatinous bodies, but Harding does find it fascinating that to the best of his knowledge, no one had ever seen a dead shoggoth.

The fisherman brings the Bluebird around close to the rocks, and anchors her. There's artistry in it, even on a gla.s.s-smooth sea. Harding stands, balancing on the gunwale, and grits his teeth. He's come too far to hesitate, afraid.

Ironically, he's not afraid of the tons of venomous protoplasm he'll be standing next to. The shoggoths are quite safe in this state, dreaming their dreams-mating or otherwise.

As the image occurs to him, he berates himself for romanticism. The shoggoths are dormant. They don't have brains. It's silly to imagine them dreaming. And in any case, what he fears is the three feet of black-gla.s.s water he has to jump across, and the scramble up algae-slick rocks.

Wet rock glitters in between the strands of seaweed that coat the rocks in the Intertidal zone. It's there that Harding must jump, for the shoggoth, in bloom, withdraws above the reach of the ocean. For the only phase of its life, it keeps its feet dry. And for the only time in its life, a man out of a diving helmet can get close to it.

Harding makes sure of his sample kit, his boots, his belt-knife. He gathers himself, glances over his shoulder at the fisherman-who offers a thumbs-up-and leaps from the Bluebird, aiming his Wellies at the forsaken spit of land.

It seems a kind of perversity for the shoggoths to bloom in November. When all the Northern world is girding itself for deep cold, the animals heave themselves from the depths to soak in the last failing rays of the sun and send forth bright flowers more appropriate to May.

The North Atlantic is icy and treacherous at the end of the year, and any sensible man does not venture its wrath. What Harding is attempting isn't glamour work, the sort of thing that brings in grant money-not in its initial stages. But Harding suspects that the shoggoths may have pharmacological uses. There's no telling what useful compounds might be isolated from their gelatinous flesh.

And that way lies tenure, and security, and a research budget.

Just one long slippery leap away.

He lands, and catches, and though one boot skips on bladderwort he does not slide down the boulder into the sea. He clutches the rock, fingernails digging, clutching a handful of weeds. He does not fall.

He cranes his head back. It's low tide, and the shoggoth is some three feet above his head, its glistening rim reminding him of the calving edge of a glacier. It is as still as a glacier, too. If Harding didn't know better, he might think it inanimate.

Carefully, he spins in place, and gets his back to the rock. The Bluebird bobs softly in the cold morning. Only November 9th, and there has already been snow. It didn't stick, but it fell.

This is just an exploratory expedition, the first trip since he arrived in town. It took five days to find a fisherman who was willing to take him out; the locals are superst.i.tious about the shoggoths. Sensible, Harding supposes, when they can envelop and digest a grown man. He wouldn't be in a hurry to dive into the middle of a Portugese man o'war, either. At least the shoggoth he's sneaking up on doesn't have stingers.

"Don't take too long, Professor," the fisherman says. "I don't like the look of that sky."

It's clear, almost entirely, only stippled with light bands of cloud to the southwest. They catch the sunlight on their undersides just now, stained gold against a sky no longer indigo but not yet cerulean. If there's a word for the color between, other than perfect, Harding does not know it.

"Please throw me the rest of my equipment," Harding says, and the fisherman silently retrieves buckets and rope. It's easy enough to swing the buckets across the gap, and as Harding catches each one, he secures it. A few moments later, and he has all three.

He unties his geologist's hammer from the first bucket, secures the ends of the ropes to his belt, and laboriously ascends.

Harding sets out his gla.s.s tubes, his gla.s.s scoops, the cradles in which he plans to wash the collection tubes in sea water to ensure any acid is safely diluted before he brings them back to the Bluebird.

From here, he can see at least three shoggoths. The intersections of their watered-milk bodies reflect the light in rainbow bands. The colorful fruiting stalks nod some fifteen feet in the air, swaying in a freshening breeze.

From the greatest distance possible, Harding reaches out and prods the largest shoggoth with the flat top of his hammer. It does nothing, in response. Not even a quiver.

He calls out to the fisherman. "Do they ever do anything when they're like that?"

"What kind of a fool would come poke one to find out?" the fisherman calls back, and Harding has to grant him that one. A Negro professor from a Negro college. That kind of a fool.

As he's crouched on the rocks, working fast-there's not just the fisherman's clouds to contend with, but the specter of the rising tide-he notices those glitters, again, among the seaweed.

He picks one up. A moment after touching it, he realizes that might not have been the best idea, but it doesn't burn his fingers. It's transparent, like gla.s.s, and smooth, like gla.s.s, and cool, like gla.s.s, and k.n.o.bby. About the size of a hazelnut. A striking green, with opaque milk-white dabs at the tip of each b.u.mp.

He places it in a sample vial, which he seals and labels meticulously before pocketing. Using his tweezers, he repeats the process with an even dozen, trying to select a few of each size and color. They're st.u.r.dy-he can't avoid stepping on them but they don't break between the rocks and his Wellies. Nevertheless, he pads each one but the first with cotton wool. Spores? he wonders. Egg cases? Shedding?

Ten minutes, fifteen.

"Professor," calls the fisherman, "I think you had better hurry!"

Harding turns. That freshening breeze is a wind at a good clip now, chilling his throat above the collar of his jacket, biting into his wrists between glove and cuff. The water between the rocks and the Bluebird chops erratically, facets capped in white, so he can almost imagine the sc.r.a.pe of the palette knife that must have made them.

The southwest sky is darkened by a palm-smear of muddy brown and alizarin crimson. His fingers numb in the falling temperatures.

"Professor!"

He knows. It comes to him that he misjudged the fisherman; Harding would have thought the other man would have abandoned him at the first sign of trouble. He wishes now that he remembered his name.

He scrambles down the boulders, lowering the buckets, swinging them out until the fisherman can catch them and secure them aboard. The Bluebird can't come in close to the rocks in this chop. Harding is going to have to risk the cold water, and swim. He kicks off his Wellies and zips down the aviator's jacket. He throws them across, and the fisherman catches. Then Harding points his toes, bends his knees-he'll have to jump hard, to get over the rocks.

The water closes over him, cold as a line of fire. It knocks the air from his lungs on impact, though he gritted his teeth in antic.i.p.ation. Harding strokes furiously for the surface, the waves more savage than he had antic.i.p.ated. He needs the momentum of his dive to keep from being swept back against the rocks.

He's not going to reach the boat.

The thrown cork vest strikes him. He gets an arm through, but can't pull it over his head. Sea water, acrid and icy, salt-stings his eyes, throat, and nose. He clings, because it's all he can do, but his fingers are already growing numb. There's a tug, a hard jerk, and the life preserver almost slides from his grip.

Then he's moving through the water, being towed, banged hard against the side of the Bluebird. The fisherman's hands close on his wrist and he's too numb to feel the burn of chafing skin. Harding kicks, scrabbles. Hips banged, s.h.i.+ns bruised, he hauls himself and is himself hauled over the sideboard of the boat.

He's s.h.i.+vering under a wool navy blanket before he realizes that the fisherman has got it over him. There's coffee in a Thermos lid between his hands. Harding wonders, with what he distractedly recognizes as cla.s.sic dissociative ideation, whether anyone in America will be able to buy German products soon. Someday, this fisherman's battered coffee keeper might be a collector's item.

They don't make it in before the rain comes.

The next day is meant to break clear and cold, today's rain only a pa.s.sing herald of winter. Harding regrets the days lost to weather and recalcitrant fishermen, but at least he knows he has a ride tomorrow. Which means he can spend the afternoon in research, rather than hunting the docks, looking for a willing captain.