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

  I dismissed his bleak cosmicism. “How do I escape this cylinder?”

  “Escape?” He laughed, a symphony of crickets. “We are minds. We sit and think, chat, remember, hope, wish, go mad. No matter; all mentation powers their machines. See how some cylinders blink and darken? The Old Things drain them to the lees. Over time, the minds revive and are tapped again. After twenty thousand years of such usage, we die, our patterns eroded through quantum decoherence. They replace us with ruthless economy.”

  “Twenty thousand years!”

  “It is the blink of the cosmic eye. The Old Things have existed for seventy billion years. Yet compared to the Lattice, they are children. Infinity lacks age; it is a loop, a recursive ring, a dragon eating its tail, the unending pages of The Book That Never Sleeps.”

  * * *

  I am no longer Chydi, not even transhuman. I am Cylinder #35TU8JQ8, a pattern of quantum electric impulses. I possess only will and memory. That is not enough. They have taken everything.

  The other cylinders accept me with a peculiar mixture of madness and curiosity. They are ravenous for news and diversion but offer no hope. Rather, they take perverse pride in its destruction.

  “The bee cannot build a bridge; the butterfly cannot make a philosophy,” says Cowl, a typical specimen. “Our crowning endeavors are honeycombs and cocoons compared to the great works of the Old Things and the might of the Ungods.”

  I demur. “Our monuments, our music, perhaps our genes will survive.”

  “No,” says Cowl. “Humanity will vanish like petals in the wind. In a million years, no one will remember us. In billions more, even our galaxy will be torn apart by gravity. By then, the Old Things will have abandoned their current hosts, transmigrating through timespace to possess yet another species in some other macrocosm.”

  “Our machines will carry on,” I insist. “Gi is benevolent and wise.”

  “No,” says Cowl. “One species yields to another and another, flesh or steel, on it goes. This is the way of all things, the random rhythm of the cosmic tide. We are doomed to live and die forgotten in a reality so vast we cannot comprehend it, one so cold and indifferent we dare not consider it. We are spiders spinning webs before the futile fury of dying stars.”

  So he says, so I fear. Yet there are days when I do not believe this. Life was too strange and sweet a thing to lack substance. I remember silver fog coiling through the highlands of Nithor. I remember Kaldoun’s touch on the night we met. I recall my father’s difficult love and his final stand.

  The Old Things evolved from unknown to unknowable. Perhaps, our embryonic minds can still flower into something greater and more beautiful than that which we can or will now or ever conceive. Or perhaps, beyond even the lattice of infinity and its ever-changing complexity exists one unbroken and never-ending moment of bliss.

  J.E. Bates is a lifelong communicant of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other mind sugar and screen candy. He’s lived in California, Finland, and many worlds in between, and would like to embark on a year-long spaceflight to Mars, if only to catch up on all his reading. He’s read too many books and too many authors to name only a few as favorites, but has spent the last couple years successfully dodging ASOFAI spoilers. He can be found at twitter.com/jeebates or jeebates.wordpress.com.

  Vol de Nuit

  Gord Sellar

  Illustrated by Nick Gucker

  Anyone might think you were already dead, a ruined sack of fibers and nerves immersed in your piloting tank, but within the HUD’s projection field, you are terrifyingly alive and aware of what’s going on outside. The shattered, broken topologies of the tear flicker in that place in your brain where things are seen that you’ve never laid eyes upon. It’s all so brutal and impossible and wrong that you wonder for a moment whether the resonator network might be failing, filling empty space with something more interesting.

  That would come as no surprise, given the number of patches—hardware, wetware, software—that keep it running, thrumming like a nervous system strung invisible and immaterial across the spaces between each ship within the whole armada. One body from many.

  The thought has barely ebbed when, irony of ironies, the overloaded resonator network gives out, leaving you caught at the crest of the violation as the mathematics of the universe begin to fight back, mindlessly suturing back together. You, all of you—the whole vast armada of decrepit little ships—are left soaring half-blind through the cold blackness toward what ought to be unreal . . . toward what should never have been possible.

  You’ve helped kill impossible things before. The impossible doesn’t count for much. Nor do you, but one takes consolation where one finds it.

  As you wait for the network to come back online, the spectacles of past battles dance through your mind: shuddering forms backlit by half-consumed suns, and the faces of those you’ve lost to this so-called “war.” When did we start calling it war, to throw millions of people into a black raging hole and hope for the best? Like all who have gone to war, you are haunted: nameless faces flash through your mind, people ripped so completely out of existence you recall only silhouettes like bruises against the walls of the mothership.

  Anticipation—it feels like queasiness, deep in your guts—is building. Though the resonator network still hangs, the map display remains live, and you can track yourself and every other ship in the armada, soaring toward the point on the map named Arras. Nobody knows what Arras might be: a world that was swallowed after it was mapped or maybe just the last locale from which a distress signal got through to some drifting, antique data buoy. Whether the name of the system is an epitaph or a going concern, none can say, but one thing’s clear—if there was a planet, it’s gone now.

  There’s back and forth on the comms, clueless debate about which possibility seems likeliest. You ignore it. Speculation and rumor can’t bring back the lost souls of any long-dead ship or swallowed planet, and the prattle can do nothing but distract you. Everyone knows that, of course, but most people will do anything to avoid that feeling that hovers in the back of the mind throughout missions like this—the sense that one is about to die alone and be ripped from the fabric of spacetime so hard that nobody even remembers one to mourn her passing.

  But as the shipboard computers all struggle to bring the fragmented network all the way back online, one thing is clear: the puncture in reality is sealing shut. In a normal ship’s sensor range, it would appear already healed, in fact. This would surprise nobody. Only down within the boiling, raging soup of virtual particles is the bruise visible, the lingering damage warping local spacetime despite the universe’s best attempt at mathematical self-correction. Still, even there, the resonator’s readings show that the broken topologies are on the mend. The aberrations remain, for now—vast, screaming severed chunks of the things, the endless maws screaming silently, the bright spray of viciously destructive dark matter that sprays out invisibly—but they are slowly wilting, passing out of existence.

  All but the biggest anomaly, which is beeping now on the map. Nothing like imaging is possible, yet. For a few minutes, the thing will remain a mere theoretical possibility, the warning of a tumor bleeding through a statistically unavoidable fracture in the wall between the branes, turned ravenous by the anthropic static of a universe crammed with sentient observers and the inevitable reek of wave function collapse.

  The waiting leaves you thinking of worlds you have not visited, promises you have failed to keep. Your nervous system groans, one or another vestigial reaction you have not yet isolated and eliminated; some biological process left inside your flesh like a statistical amalgam of a former circle of lovers, more out of sentimentality than any longing to return. Your species may not be perfect, but the ignobility of the ancient world—

  Then the resonator network is back online, fully and completely, and the shriek of the warning system begins again—this time, at a familiar pitch. The thing has come through. It has remained through. Now is not the time to pa
nic, regardless of the shrillness of the alarm. No, now is the time to concentrate and to accept the yanking of the thing’s enormous vast mass as it coils its spacetime into yours, spiraling both into the paracomplex geometries of its innards.

  If you want to kill one and live, you have to just focus on the maw, focus on the teeth and the tongues that splay out along impossible, enfolded s-circles as it drags you, all of you, toward their complex meta-intersections. You need to ignore the panic and all the flashing lights on your HUD and the scream of the warning signal and just wait without hope or fear in a perfectly calm silence.

  You must wait longer than any sane person could bear. Wait until you can see the viscous dust-fluid goo that makes up the inner membranes of the thing; wait ’til the vectors of force and energy make every tiny, invisible pore on your hairless body pucker. Ignore the nightmares fruiting through your consciousness, their spores clotting the pathways of your mind.

  Focus on the ghostly curvatures of that geometrically impossible, defiant maw you see through the network uplink, the image electromagnetically induced directly into your brain as your glazed-over eyes stare blankly.

  The instant you always wait for is the one when you can see the teeth not as a whitish, vicious mass but as distinct fangs, ghostly clumps sprouting from a loosely defined tesseractile point, a bouquet of fangs poised in eerie superposition. When you can see the meta-concentric s-circles and just make out the contradictory curvatures they trace through spacetime, it’s time to prime the topology bomb. Launch the missile, and watch it glide in, now part of a swarm—for every other fighter has launched one too, just when you did—and watch them converge, detonating in a fine matrix that unwinds the mathematics of the thing’s attack, right from that bright and terrible center.

  Launch too soon, the mouth will spit the missiles back out at you and surge away into the blackness, leaving you blinded by the flash of its departure, bundled traces of cognitive pseudopodia flickering against the insides of your eyelids as you realize the micromissile is nearby and about to blow. You’ll be gone, and it’ll be hunting down worlds. Launch too late, and instead it sucks you in by reflex just before the missile shreds the grid and swaps you out, leaving behind virtual particles to fill the gaps. You end up dragged back into its reality, ripped out of the universe so profoundly that nobody even remembers you existed.

  So you need to time it just right, and the machines, those blessed ubiquitous machines, are no help. It’s one of the few things machines can’t do for humanity: if they could, you wouldn’t be out here. You would not be shuddering on your couch—despite the neurochemical balancing and the focus drugs—at the sight of the thing in the distance, a vast hallucinogenic mouth spraying colors that cannot exist, writhing in a million visible eigenstates at once. A smear of mindless, hungry awfulness.

  You are a destroyer of worlds, you mutter the mantra. I am the destroyer of you.

  In your mind’s eye, you let the attack play out. You, loosing your missile at the right moment. The long, bright form disappearing into the distance, taking its place in the gridbomb, amid identical missiles loosed by the other fighters. The assemblage disappears into the depths of that enormous, world-spanning maw. The thing senses danger and, with a speed terrifying in a thing that gargantuan, coils up into itself. The bright flash across the visible and invisible spectra, filtered by your HUD, when this aberration in spacetime collapses and silence . . . and relief. Once again, you are close enough to destroy the thing and far enough away not to be transmuted into mere lost data.

  It’s a story you tell yourself, assault after assault. So far, it’s always come true.

  * * *

  Today, luck and skill converge again. You survive the run, slump into the anticlimax of what passes for victory, and drift to the bottom of your tank as your fighter’s AI takes over and turns the ship around, launching you back toward the safety of your carrier.

  The drugs suppress the dreams and accelerate the deterioration of your memories, something that inspires bottomless gratitude. The comms were wild with screams—more pilots than usual hit their neurological tipping points, and more pilots than usual soared into oblivion. The fact that you cannot remember their names or faces doesn’t erase the sight of their ships tumbling into the vast, hungry awfulness just before the gridbomb went off.

  * * *

  Back at the carrier, the ship wakes you, gently jostling your tank before singing into your brain. You are gently decanted from your tank and down the secure tubesystem. In a temporary assessment tank, you submit to the mandatory brainscan and are decanted onward, to go off in search of something—food, someone’s body, some other distraction—to still the shakes and fill the yawning emptiness of knowing.

  That’s what you’re supposed to do, and they test you to make sure you will. Nothing so brutish as the bad old days, the alienists and the software interrogations and the rest of it. Now, they just scan your carefully redistributed brain, look for significant changes, and tweak the plasticity of pertinent regions. However fucked up you were when you were conscripted, all you have to do is manage to stay that fucked-up in basically the same way, and you’re fine. They check to see whether you’re cracking from the awe or on the verge of worshipping the things, and that’s about it. Regular PTSD is more like the common cold used to be: yes, it trips off minor SAN check alerts, just like space sickness or cabin fever or survivor’s guilt, but they can fix any of those things in a minute flat. Beep: that’s the sound of chemically reverting your wiring, so you’re good as new.

  It’s the deeper changes that they’re obsessed with, now . . . the ones that come on slowly but transform you into something profoundly inhuman.

  Because, those changes? They can happen to anyone. They do happen to anyone. There’s a reason these things you kill used to be “gods:” their enormous, twisting beauty; the vast proboscides lapping the hull of your ship; the ghostly nest of feelers suckling at your mind; the polydimensional maw that—no matter what side you approach—always seems to be facing you directly, drifting forward to swallow you whole.

  Every last pilot, watching for that contradictory interlocked curve of the teeth, that moment when they become clear against the shivering mountains of cyclopean gums and burning drool and the shredded remains of dead things the size of moons, feels as if the monstrosity has turned to face them personally. The ones to watch out for are the hotshots who say they don’t feel even a little reverence for the things. They’re the ones who end up falling to their knees to beg for mercy, who end up soaring into the maw screaming hallucinogenic nonsense over the comms, obliterated in the interbranal vapor and leaving behind nothing but vague, clouded memories by those who survive those runs.

  The machine beeps, the scan finished. The numbers don’t look quite right, but the inhuman, monstrous laws of triage let you past. You’re stable enough, the machine decides—at least for now. It was a hard run, today; many fighters were tipped into insanity, and that always plays havoc with the ones who are left behind. On a normal run, you’d be held back for deeper treatment, but for now, you’re close enough.

  * * *

  The carrier teems with distractions, all transient: the bodies of other pilots, ejected from their fighters, bound together in vast collective tangles like jellyfish, wet and shivering with vestigial sexual responses. Vast dream engines that swallow anyone willing to slip into the right tank, and feasts rebuilt at the molecular level to surge through your retooled flesh, imparting only optimal energy and nutrients no matter how much you consume. Hell, even the chemisynth glands that cluster at the root of your own brain.

  You pour your jellyfish self into the bed of warm, soft goo in your private tank, not yet ready for any of these diversions. It’s not like you: usually, you go straight to the Pleasure Tanks or log into the Dreaming, to pretend you are still human, grappling with human crises and human joys.

  What keeps you going? It’s as impossible to track down as the tesseractile fractal-coiling o
f these things, the way pseudopodia branch and lock together through interacting superstrings. They’re impossible to catch or hold onto. Killing the things doesn’t bring joy; there’s no elemental surge of happiness, no feeling of vindication. You’d be happy enough to have retained your skin and bones, to be washing laundry on some evac-liner and watching the battles by broadcast if that were what you’d been rated to do a decade ago when you graduated from the training crèche. It’s not some vast, ossified drama of revenge for you: your parents’ faces flicker through your mind, sometimes, but you’ve killed hundreds of these things; you know millions upon millions of them have been obliterated, more than there were people on your world.

  You’ve gotten close to falling into the blackness, of course, but not on the easy runs. You ask yourself what’s kept you going since the Surge, since that thing showed up in the sky when you were a kid, and somehow you were one of the lucky ones and got hustled onto a launch before it swallowed the whole planet—the whole damned thing—in a single, ridiculous gulp. But you’ve always resisted. What would be the point of worshipping a natural phenomenon like that? It’s as stupid as worshipping anything, god or plague or machine.

  But today, the interlocking teeth remain, bright against the violet-green electrogravitic blackness of the inner maw and the spectacle of the thing unfurling into its full glory. There’s no good reason for it: you’ve joined the ritual countless times, dispatched hundreds upon hundreds of these horrors. Today, the fighters scream their warped hallelujahs and namu amidas as they slip toward their doom; they linger all around you, poisoning the sweet goo of your storage bed, leaking into the tendons and nerves of your body in the dimness of your tank.

  Bristling, luminous eyes flicker—at you specifically—from the depths of the mouth. They are like the eyes in a photograph, always seeming to look directly at you, no matter where you stand . . . yet those eyes in the maw, you half-believe they saw you. Like the eyes of spectral monarchs watching from across the twin gulfs of death and the lost eons. The tendrils have wound around something in you and cling even now, refusing to let go.