Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Read online

  “Damage to the mind,” the pendulous, silver-robed imperator said, walking in and regarding the captive as one might a disgusting insect.

  “But I saw it,” the cyborg said, looking up at the newcomer and away in fear. “The White Ship. The living darkness. The eyes in that darkness. Nodens save me.”

  “It is a fantastic story,” Harley’s interrogator said. “Spell-sailing? Going into the Null? Finding one of the old star ships from before the First Dominion?”

  “Be careful, Prefect,” the imperator said, putting a hand on his own truth stick. “Do not allow the blasphemous ravings of a decaying mind to infect your own.”

  “Apologies, my lord,” the prefect said, bowing humbly.

  “That said, I believe there is truth within the tale,” the silver-robed man pronounced, walking a circle around them both. “I believe it intended to report a criminal operation, as stated. As for what happened after . . . I think that, following the struggle to arrest these criminals, the ship passed too close to the Null.”

  “I suppose that makes sense, my lord,” the prefect said, nodding. “These programmed agents’ minds are already so fragile.”

  “Exactly,” his leader went on. “And we know well the effect the Null has upon even the most stable of prefects. Would that not explain the fantastic parts of its story?”

  “If you say so, my lord,” the interrogator said, knowing the folly of arguing. “It certainly explains why he cannot tell the same story twice.”

  “Yes,” the silver-robed imperator said, quite pleased with his reasoning.

  “What should we do with him?” the prefect asked.

  The imperator pondered the question for a moment and smirked.

  “Put him back to work, of course,” he declared.

  * * *

  The cyborg decided to sit his half-meat behind on a lump of rubble, right where Crashtown’s bar used to be, to blend in with Nebar’s many hard luck cases.

  Such persons seemed more plentiful, these days, but only because the great fire had burned so much of the city. Indistinguishable, the badly reassembled and freshly reprogrammed Harley sat and listened for an answer to his silent question.

  Had anyone seen the White Ship?

  There were rumors, of course. Some saw it prowling about Serania; others claimed it docked at Endraxus-7. One wag said it was crewed by Valerians, yet another said Xards. A few claimed to have met its captain, who wore a strange, silver object about the neck.

  So many stories. So few facts.

  Day after day, Harley sat in that spot, asking no questions, hearing all answers. In time, he became the one who spread the rumors, hoping to learn more. As the legend of the White Ship grew, he became the one others came to for information, never suspecting his true purpose.

  Days and nights became years and decades. Crashtown grew, shrank, and grew yet again as Nebar’s fate ebbed and flowed. The Third Dominion fell, and the Ecclesians with them, only to be replaced by something worse.

  And as the Null grew larger in the sky, coming closer with each new year, still Harley sat, waiting for answers.

  It was not until over a hundred years had passed—the Null almost upon Nebar—that someone finally came. A very old woman wrapped in a blue cloak moved silently through the nearly abandoned ruins that remained of Crashtown.

  She found Harley in the shrine his pilgrims had built. The walls were covered with scraps and stories, rumors and tales. Evidence gleaned from all over the Twenty-Three systems was festooned here in the hopes that the prophet would distill answers from them.

  “I hear you seek the White Ship,” she said, running a webbed finger along the silver object at her neck.

  “I do,” the old cyborg said, barely able to stand. “Tell me . . . have you seen it?”

  “I have,” she said, holding out her hands in long-overdue forgiveness. “Come, friend. See for yourself.”

  * * *

  And so did the last living victim of the Ecclesians at last leave his shrine, reunited with the ancient vessel he spurned so very long ago, and escape the slow doom that came for dusty, lawless Nebar in the form of the Null.

  For while the gods are mighty and their judgments usually absolute, they are sometimes also kind.

  J. Edward Tremlett, aka “The Lurker in Lansing,” is a graduate of Ohio University’s Creative Writing program. His travels have taken him around the world—most notably a 7-year stint in Dubai, UAE. He was the webmaster and chief writer for the Wraith Project, the author of Spygod’s Tales, and is one of the more prolific contributors to the third incarnation of Pyramid magazine. His writing has also seen print in Worlds of Cthulhu, The End is Nigh, and the Echoes of Terror anthology. He lives in Lansing, Michigan, with two cats and a mountain of Lego bricks.

  Vishwajeet: Conqueror of the Universe

  D.A. Xiaolin Spires

  Illustrated by Sishir Bommakanti

  The cavity of her chest opened, and we climbed in. Our parents waved teary goodbyes. It was still light, but hints of the evening sunset had begun to show. I held up my handkerchief and waved, and it spelled out goodbye in wispy holographic letters, like ghost traces of sparklers in the air.

  Her name was Vishwajeet. Generally, this was a Bengali male name, but all the Bengali female names had to do with grace, feathers, and water lilies—silky, soft things—and Vishwajeet was far from that. Certainly, she flew with grace, but the insides smelled like a sewer pit since she was mostly constructed from disposed livestock ends: lungs, toes, snouts, and beaks. Sure, they ground them up, dressed them, and molded them into organic fleshy tubes and muscles, but the smell stayed like stale cigarettes in a rundown bar. You can hide the body, but you can’t scrub the stench away, custodian Lenny used to say to me, his mouth pulled wide open to display his missing teeth. He would take the mop full of guts and shake its soppy locks at me.

  Vishwajeet meant “conqueror of the universe.” This was an apt name for the ship that would take us on our mission to engage with the creatures that had signaled to us from a few light years away. A simple mission: we would visit them, they’d visit us later. Just a host family type deal. In freshly dyed hair and new overall spacesuits, I felt overdressed for an exchange student.

  The Conqueror of the Universe, Vishwajeet, held steady throughout our ascent, our breach through the higher levels of the atmosphere, and into space. It wasn’t my first time in orbit, but this was an altogether different kind of ship.

  “Hey, Azalea. Let’s get to the rec room. I’ve brought bubbles!” Ravi pounced on me, holding up two bottles.

  “Ravi! You’re not supposed to bring those!”

  “What are you now, the ship police?” He paraded down the hall, blowing his glowing orbs of light.

  After we boarded, it took awhile for our eyes to adjust to the dim lights of Vishwajeet’s inner core. She was built for conservation; she expelled very little matter, everything was reused. Even the lights were extracted from our own waste.

  We flew for days in this dim light. Ravi’s luminous bubbles cast a greenish glow off her cavernous innards.

  It was the approach toward the border of the KGKGGGGK9 region, about 0.1 light-year from the Raskillions that we would meet, when the problems started. Ravi’s bubbles began to pop immediately after blowing them.

  That might have sounded like an innocent accident, but these things don’t pop. They were ephemeral and cast a cool green glow, but they were far from cheap toys. They were exploration device buddies crafted to flex and withhold up to one billion pascals (or one hundred thousand bars, basically one hundred thousand times more atmospheric pressure than on earth). Which meant we should have been be dead. Nothing could pierce the balloons—they only popped when you initiated the correct destruction sequence, a verbal command that would scramble the particles of their interior structure. And I know Ravi wasn’t doing that because he had lost his voice shouting in his sleep over several days and fell into a coma.

  All of us students were af
fected. I was seeing pink confetti, like floaters in your eyes but fluorescent and squiggly. Ravi’s bubbles kept popping. He let out a bunch of the globes when he was sick in bed, and they outlived his consciousness. While he dreamt, they floated about. Occasionally, they snapped to shredded bits that were incorporated into Vishwajeet’s flesh in a matter of days. Sometimes, I saw Lenny mopping them up, first. Even Lenny, who was as tough as steel bars, was not in the best shape. His lips looked purple, and his hair was beginning to thin up top.

  Yet we were still on target for our landing, and the proper authorities knew of our distress. We would be sent to medical facilities when we landed. There was not much they could do. The authorities said that weird phenomena were not unusual for first timers, and they had a likelihood of 99.9 percent of being reversed once on friendly ground.

  Vishwajeet wasn’t doing too well herself. Maybe, she choked on a few bubble shards too many. Her lights were dimmer, and I spent most of my time sitting in the dining space since her shudders were getting more intense. Perhaps, it was my imagination, but passing through corridor four, the one between the waste transference center and my room, felt like there was less oxygen than usual.

  The next day, I started coughing.

  At first, it was just a few tickles in my throat, but they became full-on hacks. I felt like something was choking me. One intense whoop, I dislodged these forms from my throat. They were geometric and almost beautiful, like snowflakes. And they were bright, which helped me see in the ever-growing darkness of Vishwajeet’s belly.

  They came that night. A hollow voice. A wet appendage. I could feel its slimy caress on my cheek, and I backed away. I didn’t know if they were real or in my head. Cough more, they ordered. Let out those reels.

  I didn’t know what “reels” they were talking about, but I did cough, involuntarily. A series of loud, tongue-slopping gulps and the snowflake forms were gone.

  I had nowhere to go by now. The students were confined to their rooms, our chaperones didn’t pick up. If I had known earlier of what was to come, I might have panicked. I might have taken up reins, tried to contact our handlers and turn around, but I had no idea.

  They came again the next night.

  I was brushing my teeth, watching the pink floaters glide past, when I felt a wet towel wrap around my shoulder. No, it wasn’t a towel, or at least, it wasn’t my towel. All the towels were to my left, accounted for. The arm that wrapped around me was doughy but flexible and maintained a kind of structural integrity. I couldn’t rip it off.

  Your coughs. Cough them out, they ordered.

  There was really no light left in Vishwajeet, only emergency power for air and sustenance. But I had siphoned a bit of power away from the grid to power a tiny nightlight in my bathroom. I could see in the mirror an arm: bumpy, pockmarked. The arm snaked around me. My own limbs were no longer visible within its tires of obese bulges. My body was engulfed, like a coin that had fallen through a crack in the sidewalk. Face covered, I couldn’t see anything, and it was getting harder to breathe. My nose was smooshed against the slimy flesh. It smelled like a thousand cockroaches had scuttled and pooped over the flesh, and in a gap, I saw a glimpse of something horrid, something I wish I could take back.

  It was Ravi’s hand. I swear it was his hand, chestnut brown and smooth, wearing the very gold ring he boasted his grandmother had given him when he was five. It was sticking out of this slug-like limb, and the hand was moving, too.

  “Ravi, is that you?” I whispered. But my whisper was muffled. The stench invaded my nostrils until I think even my olfactory facilities gave out.

  There was no sign of Ravi. The hand protruded out from the limb like an incongruous hitchhiker. It was baffling, that one hand, undulating as the arm moved.

  I managed to push the slug arm from my face and screamed at the top of my lungs. Out of my mouth came more tiny snowflakes, their itchy presence in my throat inducing coughing spasms. From the corner of my eyes, thin snake-like tentacles reached out and grasped at these snowflakes, glancing my cheek. I could feel the residual slime. The slug arm still had my shoulders, but I wiggled like I’ve seen earthworms do in distress and felt a loosening.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  I heard Vishwajeet’s voice—or at least, the programmed voice of that smooth average of all the females on our planet.

  Sorry, Azalea, she said in nonchalance. Her cadence never changed. They call me Conqueror of the Universe, but even conquerors can be held captive. I thought I loved them, but it was a hoax. I found out when it was too late. They penetrated me. The space-borne viruses. I thought viruses were only airborne, but these travel in the folds of spacetime itself. I’ve been trapped here, swimming in a loop both spatially and temporally. We should have reached the Raskillions long ago.

  “No,” I thought. I opened my eyes wide to try to grasp at anything. A toothbrush, a pen, anything I could use to fight. It was pointless. There was nothing I could get to. The arms kept swatting my attempts.

  Azalea, said the voice, still ever so smooth. They are rewriting my DNA. My flesh, those dead animals—they are making them devolve. They are no longer flesh of my strong ship; they have gone back further than mammals from which they were pulled. They are devolving into a more ancient being, but it is inconsistent.

  She’s made of parts, I thought. Just parts, and they’re tearing her to pieces, making her go feral. Tentacles wrapped tighter around me. Ravi’s disembodied hand loomed up, and I looked away.

  “Vishwajeet, stay with me,” I cried. “You can reverse this! Look into your programming. There are fumigation techniques.” All that came out of my mouth were some muffled whimpers. Another wet arm petted my lips, fondled my eyelids, leaving gooey streaks.

  “Vishwajeet, Conqueror of the Universe. You can slay this virus. You can reverse this and dislodge from the spacetime glitch. I believe in you,” I said inward. Another gooey arm pulled off my sneaker and soaked my socks in viscous slaver.

  * * *

  “Azalea,” she said.

  I wiggled my fingers. It was cold. I touched my eyes.

  “Azalea,” said the voice. “Wake up. You’ve reached Lonard, home of the Raskillions.”

  I licked my lips. They were dry. I felt a breeze move up my pants, and they ballooned as a silky scarf settled on my face. I picked up a hand to move it away, and my eyes opened.

  I startled. The world was bright, and all around me was green. Green everything. Not just trees but little insects and the sky and clouds.

  “Where am I?” I ask.

  “I told you already. Lonard, home of the Raskillions. I’m your host family sister, Ranna.”

  I looked at her. “You’re green.”

  “No, no. I’m actually quite colorful. It’s just your human eyes can’t register all the hues and renders it all as green.”

  “Why green? Why not black and white?”

  “I heard it’s different for everyone. Maybe you have a fondness for green?”

  Something is distracting me, a kind of voice in the back of my head. Vishwajeet.

  “What happened? Where’s the ship? And Ravi, my friends?”

  “They’re safe. You guys had an . . . accident.”

  “I remember atmosphere failures, oxygen deprivation, and . . .”

  “It was just a collision. And temporary. Your school cooperated with mine, and we overrode Vishwajeet’s commands. She’s fine.”

  “And Ravi?”

  “Who’s Ravi?”

  “The tall one with zits. He’s got spiky hair.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t get to meet everyone onboard. I just heard from our school headquarters that the ship was okay, and they delivered you to my door. You were shaking in your sleep.”

  “Ranna.”

  “Yes, that’s my name.”

  I looked at Ranna. Like everything else, she was all green. Her back arced into a U, like a drawn bowstring. She was slender with big eyes. She had hair like humans, down to
her waist. Her physiology seemed mostly like ours, which was unsurprising given the school exchange policies.

  “I brought you our sweet potato soup. You’ll love it. Sweet without being cloying and a perfect soother. Eat, sleep. My mother will be home soon, and she’ll be in to check if you’re okay.”

  I closed my eyes again, feeling heavy. I heard a clink as something was set next to me. I could feel the breeze passing through my clothes again. I was cold, but I was too tired to convey it.

  For the next three days, they slowly nursed me back to health. We went over our assignments, comparing our mathematics advancements and forms of similar tech. I could think again and convey some fundamental principles governing our universe. We compared notes. I was getting much stronger.

  Ranna lost her father long ago to a work-related explosion. It was pure luck Ranna’s mom was still around. She was supposed to deliver a sachet of documents to her husband but was delayed, a few moments that saved her skin. They never found out what caused the blast. They thought it was a leak, but it was never confirmed. Ranna told me this story one evening with a somber expression.

  I saw the hurt in her eyes, and I never again asked more about her family.

  Ranna’s mom was slender and had the same flowing hair as Ranna. She told me to call her Kanella. Kanella would hum when she was working on the garden outside where my bed was. I could hear sweet scales that seemed to travel far in one way only to shift about wildly left and right until they evened out and played backward. Once, in the midst of her humming, I asked if I could sleep indoors, and she shook her head. She said that the air was good for my recovery. Then she resumed her humming.

  We were supposed to get together at a big potluck with other students, and I was thinking about what kind of food I could make. I didn’t even know what vegetation would be suitable for human palates here. The sweet potatoes seemed to offer nutrition. But I wasn’t sure what else things were made of. Most foods Ranna gave to me were rendered into soups, pastes, and pies.