Future Lovecraft Read online

  Now, over to the Olde One heads. Rather tough is this stuff, I can tell you. We use, therefore, a pinch of robust korund and open the heads from the flipped-up underside, starting from the middle to the starpoints. We do this five times...and again. I prepared this for you. After removing the ganglia system...Don’t waste ‘em; this will make a wonderful desert served with cream and strawberries...you can have a good look at the brains, light-blue and semi-liquid to the touch, just as they should be.

  Now we fill our mushroom/mint/tomatoes tart into the head, chop the koteletts into cubes of seven-inch length, and add them, decorated with a blossom. This won’t even just be a heaven for the tongue, but for the eye, as well....

  Enjoy!

  *switch*

  ***

  The Literary Circle

  *glibber glibber knugk* (subtitles, English translation)—In your opinion, does the new issue lack its former esprit? It’s charmless....”

  *glibber knk glib gnub*—“Just the opposite. I believe that the Sanskrit translation is another step to a better understanding of what we call acceptance of....”

  *gnib*—“Acceptance of what?”

  *glib glib glib*—“Of the art, as such, what it means to adjust to the deeper sense of life.”

  *gub brb blrb*—“I always hear ‘acceptance’; what about the practical advantage?”

  *gub blb grb*

  *knub*

  *gub kn brurb*

  *switch*

  ***

  The topic of today:

  “More freedom for the Dholes”

  An assemblage of the seven leading races has come together to discuss the petition of the Dholes to have more rights on their planet, Yaddith. The problem is that the race of the Nug-Soth also lives there and that the petition also includes a plea for a healthy lifestyle and nourishment, which concerns all the other races also living on this planet, because they usually are the nourishment of the Dholes. We welcome historian Zkauba of the much-honored guild of Yaddith wizards, astro-sociologist Dr. Arthur Peterman, the Tolero Brothers, Dr. Rosa Vanderman (who is a specialist on the physiology of both Dholes and Nug-Soth), Kyle Feld from the United Army of Planet Earth, philosoph Ka-run Nuats, and the Blateleys from Wichita. Also, do we heartily welcome Dhole 7459/K.

  7459/K, please start with your arguments. You’ll have the first word....

  *switch*

  ***

  Soap Opera

  Klimax Group proudly presents: The House of Nouth

  In this episode: Will Zathatera face new troubles? Just released from jail—after he found out that his mother is, in truth, his father and a vegetarian—he accidentally killed his estranged parent and an innocent neighbour, while on drugs during a fishing holiday. What he doesn’t know is that his mother/father isn’t truly dead, but subscribed to a Malaysian dance troupe, while his neighbour...is truly dead.

  But he won’t have any rest. Unhappy, he tries to interfere in the marriage of his stepdaughter, Althera...Will he succeed?

  We press thumbs.

  *switch*

  ***

  Now, you simply break the three legs off, and fill the beetle with the garlic and a bit of Croni liquor...I’ve just prepared this....

  *switch*

  ***

  *glb glib*

  *brb brb*

  *switch*

  ***

  Haggerty and Marley are close to the hing straight. The decision must come now....

  *switch*

  ***

  The Dhole seems restless. After the argument with historian Zkauba, he/she/it seems to be losing ground. The sympathies of the public are clearly on the side of the natives, as the voting shows....

  ***

  The new single by the Alhambra Flutes....

  ...accompanied by the Tolero Brothers....

  “You just can’t catch me...but if you did, I wouldn’t care.”

  ***

  Gardening with Modern Cybernetics

  The secrets of unique blossoming, and colours simply from out of this world, revealed by the Ythians.

  Make your neighbour rip his head off!

  ***

  Crime on Io

  Seven Mooncats and a youngish Zook are dead, but who’s the victim?

  ***

  Documentary: Delve with us into the ruins of Ib and rediscover astonishing revelations of an unknown past.

  ***

  If you call now, we’ll even add this useful pincer at the price of only 30 Crex!

  ***

  Chemistry for Kids

  Part 1—How to build a door between the worlds.

  Part 2—Nitrogen bombs in three easy steps.

  ***

  The News

  The price of energy decreases, due through the find of a new crystal specimen on Venus.

  ***

  Headhunting Live

  Who will catch the criminal on the run? Call now...McCarty and his team of Old Ones are, as usual, prepared...This ain’t fun for the juvenile nightgaunt.

  ***

  Opera

  Dubbed in Ancient Egyptian and Modern English.

  Kla (Hero): What do you want of me?

  Ste (Heroine): Kill him.

  Kla: I cannot do this.

  Ste: Kill him.

  Kla: Don’t tempt me, dearest; don’t tempt me.

  ***

  The Dhole broke free! It’s rampaging through the conference room. The assembled are panic-stricken. It’s breaking down the door and moves out of sight.

  Wait for more breaking news.

  ***

  Only metres remain between Haggerty and the final. But what now? A Dhole enters the racecourse. It squeezes two participants into the corners and keeps aiming at Haggerty, simply sweeps him away....

  What a tragic ending of a gorgeous day in sports....

  ***

  News: Dhole heading for the Portal.

  News: Energy prices slightly increasing.

  ***

  *glrb nub?*

  *grub clrb?*—“What does the Dhole here?”

  *knub crlb*—“Take that for breaking my headstone!”

  ***

  “Out of my kitchen! Oh, no, the dessert!”

  ***

  Chemistry for Kids

  “The portal works and, as suspected, it reveals a Dhole...a Dhole?! Argh!”

  “It’s getting at the bomb!”

  “Well observed, Mickey!”

  BOOOMB!

  ***

  News: Studio Five has mysteriously exploded. Tragically, it also caught an energy depot close by...Stay tuned for more news.

  News: Prices for energy high as never before!

  ***

  Opera

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Kill, kill, kill!”

  *switch*

  Snow

  *switch*

  *switch*

  Shut down due to maintenance.

  ***

  Stay tuned.

  ***

  TRI-TV was yesterday! Today, we have printed paper!

  DO NOT IMAGINE

  By Mari Ness

  Mari Ness’ fiction and poetry have appeared in multiple print and online publications, including Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, Goblin Fruit, and Ideomancer. Further small insights into her mind and work can be found at: mariness.livejournal.com, and on Twitter at: mari_ness. She lives in central Florida, and openly admits to being rather grateful that the streetlight at the end of the block keeps monsters away at night.

  You, in your long, grey ships

  of cold rationality and hard mathematics,

  shimmering along the path of light,

  bending time in your starswept path:

  Do not imagine yourselves free of madness.

  Not the rich, pulsing joy of winedrunk dance,

  nor the madness that lets poets speak to stars

  and hear songs from the dripping waters

&nb
sp; of rain caught upon roofs of steel,

  or the cold, silent songs

  pulsing from the deep.

  Not the madness of high towers,

  of concrete poured over pulsing grass,

  or the frenzy of human dance,

  of instruments and drums,

  singers chanting in the dark,

  collapsing with the sun.

  Those are the insanities of earth,

  the madness that only earth and water

  can beat into bone and brain.

  But the madness of the dark,

  the madness of the silent stars,

  the madness of the dark matter

  that will move upon your ships—

  Do not imagine yourselves so free.

  Do not imagine that in this darkness,

  nothing awaits.

  Do not imagine that no one

  will hear you scream.

  In the spaces between stars,

  our tentacles pulse.

  We see your grey ships

  and thirst.

  We eat upon human screams,

  and in the shadows of the stars,

  we hunger,

  hunger.

  The bright stars in all their frenzy

  hide us well.

  We hunger. We hunger.

  You cannot imagine.

  RUBEDO, AN ALCHEMY OF MADNESS

  By Michael Matheson

  Michael Matheson currently resides in Toronto, where he works as an author, freelance editor, and technical and public relations writer. He has been a presenter at the ACCSFF and has served since mid-2010 as the editor of the Friends of the Merril Collection publication, Sol Rising.

  THE STARS GLEAM like polished bone out on the galactic rim, edging up on the borderless black of deep space at the outer reaches of the Milky Way. There are graveyards there, celestial sepulchres of rotted hulks and ruined metal that drift in slow arcs through long orbits. It’s deathly cold on the rim. Light from distant stars diffuses before it reaches so far out, not enough of it left, by the time it hits those frigid boneyards of blasted metal, to warm what lies within.

  Once, these trackless wastes of accordioned metal were home to smugglers and the kind of pirates who preyed on half-mad colonists keen to dare the endless black of the deeps and claim what lay beyond. But they died out long ago, or were driven off by the kind of men who claim a bounty for killing work. Now, only Eliana keeps silent vigil here, an accidental caretaker in this unhallowed place, where Death has walked with arms outstretched, gathering all unto him.

  With the crash and sweep of Debussy’s “La Mer” flooding over the Lacrima’s speaker system on a loop, Eliana drifts in the arms of morphia, its hot bloom in her stomach and her bowels a balm to wounds that refuse to heal. Slumped, opiate-riddled in the grimy bucket seat of her not-quite-several-hundred-feet-long, decaying shuttle, cobbled together from the skeletal hulks of still-older wrecks, she dreams the face of her dead son.

  She sprawls, tethered by fraying straps, in her pilot’s seat; enclosed in a full pressure suit of black metal and antiseptic cloth resembling nothing so much as a shroud. Only her helmet is off, the bulbous capstone floating several feet away and suspended in midair in the weightless cabin. Her head lolls one way and then another, hot tears orbing as they hit her cheeks and float off to make a starry sea of the darkness from the blank, black screens for the ship’s lateral and aft camera HUDs, arrayed around the closed shutters of the cabin’s forward viewport. She drifts between sleep and waking. Her face is grey and lined with age, framed by straggly locks of still-night-black hair. She has been out here on the edge of absolute darkness a long time.

  ***

  Twitching and whimpering in her sleep, struggling against the straps that hold her down in the weightless cabin of her ship, Eliana is awakened with a start by her ship colliding with an interposing object. Her ship tumbles from its orbit, rolling with a groan of warping metal that sounds only within the confines of the shuttle as she comes to, wiping salty streaks from her face and gulping down air.

  Debussy’s etheric, otherworldly strings and crashing cymbals drum against the cabin’s interior as Eliana reaches, bleary-eyed, for the con. She slams her palm down on its smooth, touch-sensitive face and blazing starlight floods into the ten-by-fifteen cabin as the main port’s reinforced titanium polymer shutters peel back, opening to the dizzy whirl of revolving space.

  Eliana’s eyes skitter without purchase across the scene unfolding before her. A large section of her carefully maintained graveyard home is in disarray: Scythed halves of ships that were whole only a few hours before rip and tear at one another as they pass, shards of their ionised hulls floating free in the swirling maelstrom of shorn metal. Light is sent scattering everywhere from still-reflective surfaces in the spiraling, tumbling mess that her ordered world has become.

  Shielding her eyes from the brightness, Eliana engages the cabin portal’s lumen filter and the light of the distant stars dials down to a bearably harsh brightness. Blinking away the seared patterns still emblazoned across her retinas, Eliana’s hands fly over the controls, her ship righting itself along the graveyard orbit’s lateral line at her command. Activating the ship’s lateral propulsion jets, she brings the Lacrima to a cruising halt, the ramshackle, jerry-rigged craft shuddering as it comes to a full stop and drifts into its regular orbit.

  Eliana’s eyes scan the false horizon of the debris field, her eyes slitted against the stabbing rays of ultraviolet light, calculating the origin point of the disturbance. She has let her body fall to the tender mercies of entropy, but Eliana’s mind is still razor-sharp, dulled only slightly by the last vestiges of the morphine high. The simple trigonometric equation is no challenge for a woman who once designed interstellar starships and helped her people defy the laws of physics in their ever-hungering quest to transit beyond the known reaches of space. It has been a long time since her mind wandered these neural pathways, but the slow passage of twenty years falls away in an instant, leaving her mind awake and staggeringly fast.

  The revitalisation of her faculties also awakens the grief etched deep in the seat of her hypothalamus. Firming the line of her jaw and forcing it to stop quavering, Eliana sets that pain aside and focuses on the task at hand.

  She plots the trajectory of the inciting object that has thrown her celestial cemetery into chaos. She can’t make out which piece of debris it is that has been sent hurtling like an eight-ball through the dense debris field, so she settles on tracing its wake back to the point of origin. The trail is easy to follow: A wide avenue of disturbed particles drifts out in an ever-expanding cylindrical radius. Eliana manoeuvres the Lacrima into the pathway, the ship’s capacious bulk sending small driftwood bundles of metal scattering, as the distorted shadows of tumbling objects trail across the portal and the cabin within like clutching, lingering fingers.

  ***

  All light is blotted out by something unutterably immense at the end of the tunneling pathway, the route widest here at the edge of its inception, as Eliana comes to the edge of her debris field. Beyond the field floats the absolute darkness beyond the rim, lit only by the weak blaze of stars distant beyond dreaming, beyond the scope of human lifetimes. Here, on the edge of known light where human understanding falters, time is measured in celestial reckonings.

  Eliana strains her eyes to see what thing it is that lies against the light, not backlit, instead obscuring all the light behind it as though drinking it in. Her eyes struggle to focus on the shape, but she cannot wrap her mind around its contours. The interposing object is composed of too many angles and lines that seem to warp and bleed off into the edges beyond seeing as she tries to follow them. It hurts her head to watch those inchoate lines that seem never to actually terminate. She looks away and shuts her eyes until the image clears from her mind’s eye.

  Rubbing at the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, and opening her eyes once more, Eliana is careful not to look directly at the ju
xtaposed, form-defying shadow. Instead, she stares at the space around the deeper blackness, calculating size and mass, exhaling in awe.

  The object, whatever it is, appears to be several thousand feet in length, and maybe a third of that high. And there is something roughly familiar in the design. A subtle curvature and overall aerodynamic sense to the obscuring presence that makes Eliana think back to the days when she studied propulsion engineering and hull design theory. She drums the fingers of one hand along the con panel before her while she contemplates the alien object, letting her hand fall silent as she decides that the massive, light-blotting horizontal obelisk is a craft.

  Determined to prove her theory right, Eliana straightens in her pilot’s seat and activates the Lacrima’s massive aft propulsion jets, salvaged from a derelict Saturn V rocket. Their immense roar is silent in the frictionless space, but sets the interior of the ship to shuddering violently as Eliana steers her craft around the protruding edge of the alien object.

  ***

  The Lacrima clears the obscuring edge of the alien craft’s length while Debussy swells over the ship’s speakers, rising into the middle section of the third movement of “La Mer”—the “Dialogue du vent et de la mer. Animé et tumultueux”—and Eliana is forced to slit her eyes when a baleful, red glow envelops the entirety of the ship’s cabin. On this side of the obscuring object, a deep, crimson pulsing blurs the light of distant stars. Like a breathing eye, the pulsing orb inhales and exhales light, the red shift deepening and paling sequentially.

  Eliana screws her eyes shut and turns her face away from the overwhelming ruddy light, blindly swatting at the con panel, her fingers sighted, even in self-imposed darkness, through long practice. The Lacrima’s main viewport filters out the burning red shift and Eliana opens tear-streaked eyes, blinking away the stinging salt. Her newly opened eyes focus on the strange shape before her, webbed to the side of the still-all-but-invisible craft.

  The thing attached to the side of the ship is hard to focus on, at first. It is roughly circular in shape, rising in an imperfect half-dome from the hull of the drifting, possibly derelict ship, and seemingly translucent. The hazy, ill-defined bulbous contusion on the alien ship’s hull runs the height of the craft and stretches over a quarter of its length, the enormity of the canker mind-boggling. The more Eliana focuses on the strange shape, the more she realises that it is not the dome that is red, but something within—something that pulses and breathes. Something that moves within the confines of the space, tentacled limbs roving and thrashing in amniotic dreaming.