The Future Is Blue Read online

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up. Two and two are four, you perfect moron.”

  “No, darling. My dearest hope and fondest memory. Two.” She gestured at herself and at Nikuś. “And your two, Trurl and Klapaucius, make Milosz, Staszek, Josefinka, Dymek, Kasparek, Ilonka in her Boxcase World, and me. Seven. Two and two is seven. Milosz was right.” She took the King’s ugly old face in her hands and kissed it with all the desire of their first kiss, and whispered in his ear: “My heart yields dividends unseen; thou art my soul’s annuity.”

  Then she snatched up her basket and ran. Maribel ran up the long, soft length of the Valley of N, and though the King chased after her, his bones groaned and his belly jellied with too many monarchical meals. You had to give Kings what they wanted, Maribel thought, or else, more often than not, they would rampage the known world and leave no survivors. As she bolted through the autumn grass and golden leaves, Maribel swung her silver ratchet like a war club, crouching and leaping up again like a nimble nyala as she unbound the bolts of Nikuś, Kasparek, Dymek, Josefinka, Staszek, and Milosz. Maribel ran and ran, through the garden of nectarine and nutmeg trees, of navy bean runners, prickly nopalitos, nightshades of every description, and leafy, spicy green nettles, up the steps of the nonagonal nunnery in the Neoclassical style, and shut the gate fast behind her while the King still tried to huff and puff his way up the path, calling her name.

  But up behind the King rose a wave of furious metal. Trurl’s machines stomped, steamrolled, clattered, bulldozed through the rich earth of the Valley of N, not caring what they dug up, knocking the King into the November mud as they throttled past him toward the girl Milosz had really always thought of as its mummy even though it couldn’t let her know it. The gargantuan machines made a ring around the nonagonal nunnery. Milosz hiked up its briars of wires, piles of dials, gobs of knobs, and clumps of pumps both radial and axial like skirts and let them fall at the King’s feet, forcing him to climb and climb, just to be heard, just to stare down his collection with no breath left in him.

  For a moment, nothing happened, and the King allowed himself to think that all the excitement had tired out the machines as well. Then Josefinka shot out her perfumed, pillowed arms and slammed him against the ground, moaning yes, yes, yes! Dymek unleashed several top-shelf temporary nearly probable dragons who immediately began roasting what was left of the royal hair. Kasparek spewed forth an incandescently indignant ticker tape so long that it wrapped the King like a dead Pharaoh, round and round until only his eyes bulged out and its mouth flapped free. The tape read: I hate you I hate you I hate you over and over again, thousands upon millions of times.

  Staszek stared down at the pile of King beneath it. It growled:

  You are a bad man.

  And you should feel bad.

  “Wait!” screamed the King. “It isn’t supposed to be like this!”

  Maribel popped up merrily behind the gate of the nonagonal nunnery. “Like what?” she said cheerfully.

  “We’re meant to fight monumental battles! To chase each other around the galaxy, to exchange curses so elegant the stars rearrange themselves to write down our words in the heavens! We are Nemeses! We must strive against one another, feint and parry, burn down each other’s hearts and leave a radiant spatter-sun wake of ruin behind us!”

  “That sounds like it takes a long time,” Maribel said doubtfully, stepping out of the gate. She walked over to the tape-bound King without a care in her stride and bent down to look him in the eyes. She was carrying something, but the King couldn’t move his head to see.

  “Years! Decades! Centuries!” wailed the King.

  Maribel smiled such a smile that little earthquakes trembled through the Valley of N under the weight of it.

  “But that’s boring,” she said sweetly, and held up her hand.

  A small glass boxcase rested in it, no bigger than a cigarette case. Maribel touched the lid with her finger. Inside, Ilonka stretched up her tiny hand and held it against the absolute limit of her universe. The two women nodded.

  “Nikuś? Let’s make a nation.” The round little machine danced up happily beside her. “Go on. You know you want to.”

  Nikuś grumbled and mumbled and rumbled. Its fabrication barrel rolled and boiled and clanked. And when the door in Nikuś’s belly opened, a set of bolts tumbled out, perfectly sized for fastening the hands and feet and assorted joints of a King into the earth of a lush valley, where he might, or might not, be visited for basic maintenance, if they could be bothered.

  Maribel opened the Boxcase Kingdom. A river of diamond light and jubilant sound poured out of it and into the body of the King, and as Ilonka’s people colonized this new, impossibly vast and rather hairy royal terrain, all the machines in the Valley of N, and the natterjack toads and the nightingales and the nyala and the numbats, too, could hear the tiny, tinny sounds of millions of children laughing, and millions of grown people arguing about where best to build the first pub of the post-modern age.

  This was the first of Maribel’s fortunes: that she had neither fulfilled nor denied her primary function, and thus lived, more or less, forever with the other miraculous machines in the Valley of N, doing whatever they pleased, adding two and two, rhyming, loving, dragoning, writing, making things that start with N, watering a flourishing civilization, and, as they were all deeply and truly Trurl’s children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, nothing but grandness all the way down to the infinite depths of all possible souls, never feeling the least bit sorry for anything at all.

  Down and Out

  in R’lyeh

  In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu farts in his sleep.

  If you’re dank like me, you gibber up the Old Fuck’s brainspout, crouch in there full gargoyle on his raggedy roof, wrap your gash around the slime-lung chimney, and huff that vast and loathsome shit like the space-curdled milk of your mama’s million terror-tits. Up you get, fœtid freak-babbies of the ultradeep! The nightmare beyond time and geometry and madness has an upset tum-tum. Whiff up those gargantuan gastrointestinal fugue-bubbles! Clog down the occult emanations of the Elder God! When his antediluvian ass-bombs explode all over your needy neurons, you’ll smell the apocalyptic expanse of frozen galaxies screaming forever into a red and hungry void—and just a hint of fresh eucalyptus.

  That’s all Shax and Pazuzu and my own personal self were after that night. Just a couple of eeries looking to get squamous, to swipe a little snatch of wholesome fun from the funktacular funerary fundament belonging to the Big Boss, a hit big enough to drop our brains out the bottoms of our various appendages and forget the essential, unalterable, sanity-shearing truth of our watery and unfeeling cosmos:

  R’lyeh sucks.

  Seriously. The heaving, putrescent streets swollen with black spores of dementation and the bilge water of a hundred billion nightmares, the crawling hallucinogenic slime choking every unreal gutter and askew alley, the tacky interdimensional shopfronts selling rubbish nobody wants, the ugly, kitschy non-Euclidean central business district brooding and moping up in your face, the noxious monoliths, the howling sepulchers, the best minds of your generation destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked dragging themselves through the gentrified neighborhoods looking for something to do, it’s all just the fucking worst. Trust me. I was born here. I was into nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time before it was cool.

  But anyway.

  Be me: Moloch! Dank as starlit squidshit, antique in the membrane, maximum yellow fellow! Only five thousand years old, still soggy behind the orifices, belly full of piss and pus and home-brewed, small-batch disdain for all he beholds. Keeps his tentacles proper pompy-doured and his fur 100% goat at all times. Keeps his talons on the sluggish pulse of the nightmare corpse-city that never sleeps, demoniac city on the edge of linear consciousness, cancerous kingdom of the corpulent and pustulant and decadent and stupid, the big boring phony sell-out rotting apple under the sea.

  No
t THE Moloch. Obviously. That guy’s a blue-chip maniac rocking a truly eldritch trust fund and a gentrificated uptown charnel house. But when you’re nine hundred and ninety-seventh among the thousand young of Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods, ain’t nothing left for you but the motherfucking dregs. Mom ran out of eldritch names way before I slithered along. Could’ve been worse, though. My little sister’s just called Shit. Shit’s all right. Takes after Dad more than me. (That’d be the Deadbeat All-dad of Ages, serpentine thunderfuck lustlord Yig, not that he ever bothered to come to our moonball games or birthday orgies.) Shit doesn’t have any arms or legs and you can see through her snakeskin and watch her organs ooze and squeeze according to some primordial rhythm unheard by man, but she lets me crash on her couch and eat her boyfriends whenever I want, so it’s always been yellow between us. Shit’s got that virus youngest beasties catch sometimes where they gotta prove how much smarter and busier and more hideously evil they are than everybody else all the time, so she works her cloacas off downtown for some effulgy gloon on the Planning Committee—to which I say, how the fuck do you plan the descent of the known universe into bloody infinite shrieking madness? If you have to have a board meeting about it, what’s the fhatgn point?

  But enough about my brood. Shit happens, what can you do? I’m not about to ooze out a cute little suburban drama where everything’s wrapped up in an hour and all the junior-league cyclopean horrors end up devouring the minds of the innocent as a family. I’m not gonna jaw you some dusty epic about the fœtid glory of the Old Ones, neither. They’re old. Who cares? You wanna glaak some toothless horror shambling along playing shuffleboard uphill both ways in the bloodtide, you got plenty of other options. Save that necronomicrap for prime time. This here’s public access. This here’s Radio Free R’lyeh. Harken to the electrostatic-enigmatic low-budget belch-howl of the low-rent disaffected disasters roaming these dumb slime-streets where there’s nothing to do but seethe.

  So there we were, Shax and Pazuzu and me, three eeries out on the town, all messed up with nowhere to go. Shax was my number one cultist back then, the girl-thing I was yigging on the semi-regular, a three-eyed psychic gelatinous pyramid topped with the lushest blood-seeping tentacles you ever saw. What can I say? I’m a sucker for redheads. Shax was shubby as all hell, a carnivore hungry for the meat of Moloch, up for my proboscis in her protuberances anytime, anywhere. She loved horses and schizophrenia and untranslatable manuscripts from before the dawn of time. A total nerdy little misko at heart, but my Shax had a body that drove me mundane. Sometimes she’d get this far-off cosmic look in one of her eyes mid-yig, but only because she’d swapped her vast, stygian consciousness into some poor bastard from Nowhere, Massachusetts and was strolling around a cheese shop or whatever in his skin while I whispered sweet nihilisms into the hear-hole of some boring mundflesh whose most unexplainable encounter to date had been doing his taxes.

  “Hush, babby,” I gurgled into Shax’s puncture-wound ear, into the mind of my new mammalian friend. “Just do what feels yellow and you and I will trip the light traumatic. You can’t get pregnant your first time. Everybody’s doing it. Come on, I promise I’ll still dissect you in the morning. Pretend you’re at the dentist. Just say Iä!”

  Shax always knew how to keep things eldritch in the sack.

  Pazuzu was my eerie from the minute I gibbered out of the spawn-sac and into this trashbin world. Out of one bitch, into another. He ate his mom when he was little, so me and Shit pretty much adopted him into the Niggurath brood. Who would notice one more? Even if he was a Ghast and not a what-ever-the-fuck-we-are? Mama Shub strangled Zuzu as lovingly as any of us. These days he’s another regular denizen of Shit’s couch. He kind of looks like a walking, talking, noseless scab on kangaroo legs. Straight up fœtid, was Pazuzu. All the squirmy young shubs hungered him. But my man didn’t have a cultist then. Didn’t care about getting off. Mostly what Zuzu slavered after was to get squamous and hunt himself some gloons. Not THE Gloon. Not the guy named Gloon. You don’t hunt that dank little piece of slug-ass. Not that Elgin-marble-looking motherfucker. The slug-god Gloon slithers out the eyes of that effulgy Greek statue it rides around in like a john sliding out of a rented prom limo and it hunts you. Naw, Zuzu hunts posers. Barely-larval yuppie scum with Old One pedigrees who gibber around trying to look like Gloon and talk like Gloon and corrupt the mortal world like Gloon when they’re nothing but a bunch of shoggo fuckboys who couldn’t corrupt a goddamn gumdrop without Daddy’s protective runes. They’re so fucking dun that when we call them gloons, they think it’s a compliment. But I get Pazuzu. Always have. He kicks those kruggy pukes in the face and feels like he’s making a difference in the world. He isn’t, but, you know. Let a scab dream.

  So Friday night, its hour come at last, slouched towards R’lyeh to be born. Shax and Zuzu and me beheld the sunset from the roof of our slumslime apartment henge, guggo for something fat and plasmic and new. You can actually sort of see the sun from down here, through the mundsmog of the South Pacific, stuck all over with mortal fishing boats like flies on blue flypaper. R’lyeh isn’t underwater per se. Don’t believe the brochures. It can’t even get that tired Atlantean schtick right. No, this fhtagn little backwater burg is bounded on all sides by a semi-aqueous transdimensional multi-reality beehive of space-time (comes in Pacific Blue, Sanatorium Green, and Classic Black for all your decorating needs!). It keeps the civic saltwater content at a steady dripping mucous. And inside the corpsified beehive lies the rotting honeycomb of cut-rate depravity I call home. I said before: I was born here. I won’t die here because I am infinite, unfathomable, beyond mortality and morality and corporeality, but I’ve never gotten out. How can anyone expect me to be a yawning horror of the ultradeep when I’ve never left the town I grew up in? Never met anyone but the same glabrous tentacled faces staring on the subway, never heard anything but last millennium’s Top 40 chants and prophecies blaring out of big, ugly doomboxes, never seen anything but the inside of this Old Ones Retirement Village where the streets are paved with quivering denture cream and the Early Elder Special starts at 4 every afternoon and everything worth anything has already been sucked dry by the gonzo appetites of our goddamn parents.

  Oh sure, every once in awhile, the human world falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into us, and some shard of their incomprehensibly stupid one-note reality runs aground in the black light district and we all crowd in like fat shoggo tourists, flashing and yelling and poking the native wildlife, but that party goes down on the rare and seldom, and if there’s anything more excruciatingly boring than R’lyeh’s best and brightest, it’s a goddamn human being. For real, between you and me, what is their problem? These mundflesh morons act like the angle of the emerald emanations from the Gates of the Silver Key cut their flesh to hanging ribbons. They swan around wailing and moaning like the non-Euclidean geometry of netherdimensional architecture flays their minds down to the throbbing thalamic core. But I got eyes, too, and all I see are dirty green traffic lights and urban blight. We did learn some excellently eldritch words from the last brood that came babbling through, though. Oh shit, oh fuck, oh shitfucking dammit, what the hell is that thing?

  Blah blah blah.

  So up the rooftop Shax took a drag on a fat, hand-rolled tome she got from my man Nyarlathotep, who sells papers and shred out of his dirty bookshop down on Id Row. Papa Ny, now, that beast is pure uncut misko through and through. That’s why he and Shax get on so dank. Two creeps in a crypt. Papa Ny wears his human costume 28/9, even down here, even when he’s sleeping. But on the inside, that cat’s a literal bookworm, sliming his excrescence up on his ancient manuscripts like an awkward shub on his first dancefloor. I’ve seen his stash. Those woodcuts are yellow as hell, antique porn for the R’lyeh literati, such as they are. And to make a little extra gleeth on the slant, Papa Ny cuts the endpapers out of whatever forbidden text he’s mad at that week, fills them with black Yith-spores scraped off the customers-only sink after hours, an
d sells them dag cheap, on account of which, he’s about the only Elder any of us can stand, and we get to smoke our tomes real nice up here on the roof.

  That night, Shax was burning down a flyleaf off the Book of Azathoth, sucking up the purple smoke through seven slits in her protoplasmic face and exhaling misty dodecahedrons out over the power lines and train tracks and horror-shards of our drowned and drowning city. Pazuzu scratched his scabby balls and knocked back a forty of the skunky, hoppy black bile he insisted on brewing in Shit’s closet. She hates the smell, but Shit’s way too nice to say anything. How the two of us can have come out of the same cloaca is just beyond.

  “Fuck this,” grunted Pazuzu. “I’m sober as a goddamn archeologist. I wanna get bloody squamous. 100% iridescent. Straight obliterated. I wanna yank my brain out through my nose, boil it in beer, and beat the shit out of it with a fhtagn hammer. Lurk me?”

  I did, indeed, lurk him completely. So did Shax. Her tentacles twisted and lithed above the apex of her gelatinous pyramid-head.

  “Iä! Iä!” she ululated. “Screw this babby shit to the seafloor.” She threw down her tome and crushed it beneath her protean bulk. “Eeries, let’s hunt down some real ichor tonight. I wanna get ordinary. I wanna be totally fucking mundane! Thoroughly, balls to the wall, XXX normal.”

  This meant gibbering down to the Psychotic Pnakotic for pints of san with rationality chasers. I didn’t have the gleeth for that kind of action, no how, but Shax usually covered me. She’s a Yith, which is kind of like being in the mafia, except with psychic parasitical spores instead of tommy guns and zoot suits. Zuzu only ever tolerated Shax because she never acted like the richie she was, really. Shax ate shit and puked despair like a real sheol proletariat princess. Like the rest of us. So Zu carefully ignored all the times she picked up our tab.