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

  You knew what awaited you when you walked into the black tower at the center of town. You knew what the risk was, and you volunteered anyway.

  You know you should report to the SAN center. But something within you refuses, and after lounging in the dimness, letting the warmth of the goo seep into you, you sluice down familiar pipes. You are infected, but you don’t believe it; you want more flesh, soft and boneless like your own, to merge with. Some part of you screams against this simple mammalian instinct, rails against you for being fooled into infecting the whole fleet, screaming—if you will not get scanned again—to simply rest in your tank and sleep and obliterate yourself on the next run. It cries out in the name of pity and mercy.

  The eyes stare into you from the depths of the maw. The tendrils hold on, firm and cold and beautiful. You know what awaits.

  * * *

  The thought clings to you through all the uncountable hours that follow—flickering in the background of conversations, so you know it isn’t just you wondering—that through the wetness and tangle of the joy tanks, your infection has spread, recombined with the infections seeded by others from minds poisoned as subtly as yours. It bubbles up inside things said, in the way your gelatinous bodies brush against another, and in the Dreaming, you see it in the eyes of their avatars in the moments where quietness punctuates the breathing space between choreographed adventures.

  Slowly, this whole armada’s worth of pilots rots, and you find that, too, beautiful: all things, after all, must fail and crack and founder. The ship feels as if it might break completely apart from the strain of all that not-asking and not-confessing.

  Then you pass a string of dead worlds, wobbling their pendulous way around a nearly extinguished sun. You’re consuming your second meal of the day—same as the first, an amalgam of nutrients and flavors that osmose through your membrane as you recline in your personal tank. Something about those dead worlds causes a tremor inside you, makes you shiver with a sense of . . . it isn’t recognition. It’s nothing like recognition. More like some feeling equidistant between hope and panic, a readiness so deep that there isn’t even a word for it. The nightmares that have plagued you—plagued the whole ship, fluttering through your minds during the carefully attuned sleep cycles, just below detectable levels—have told you about this place, whispered their cold and tortured history. It’s like seeing some staged drama of a story you’ve heard about but never read.

  Then the alarm goes off. The names of the great dead fighter pilots glimmer in your memories, and the ship runs the usual SAN check on you, and the HUD flickers, but the tendrils have tightened their grip, subtly, holding your mind in the shape the computer is searching for. Your will is focused, your attention tuned to the anticipation of the fight, and a glimmering of yourself—the being you were before that last combat—returns. You remember and are unsettled: how could I have been like that, how could that have been me? Yet you feel the thing within you, its whispers now too faint to hear but not too soft to feel. The gnawing hunger inside your mind never, never abates, but the computer does not recognize it as anything but your own, a standard vestigial human sensation.

  Moments later, you are disgorged into your fighter and launched out into the nothingness. Your HUD is alight with information, none of it relevant anymore: the class and proximity of the monster? You used to check it religiously, but now, you feel faintly disgusted with it: how can they stat up a god? Arrogant little things, you think, ignoring the fact that you, too, are an arrogant little thing, a morsel waiting to be consumed.

  To be consumed when you have done maximum damage. Your fighter sears across the cold black out to the face of wrongness: another maw, writhing tendrils of force surging out of the quantum soup as if from the space between the branes. You shift slightly in your tank, brimming with another feeling—not your own. You feel the ravenousness, still, as a distant sensation, like the tingling in a lost limb. It’s a longing for some kind of food no mouth has ever tasted.

  It’s the one thing that makes you and these things the same: hunger is the vast and the universal truth of all life.

  As you surge out, another vestigial instinct kicks in. If you still had teeth, they would be grinding. Now, it’s just the edges of an orifice rubbing together, the ooze of the tank only slightly reducing the friction. Your mind lights up with a vision of what’s to come: the gridbomb soaring into the maw and, hard on its trail, the complete armada, screaming its black hallelujas and bleak namu amidas to the vastness, all the way to the end.

  Gord Sellar was born in Malawi, raised in Canada, and has lived in South Korea for most of the past sixteen years. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies over the past decade, most recently in Analog SF, Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis, The Book of Cthulhu II, and in numerous Year’s Best reprints. He is slowly working on a collection of Lovecraftian stories set throughout Korean history and on a novel of alchemy, brewers, distillers, rogues, mollies, proto-feminist revolutionaries, and the British navy in early Georgian-era London.

  Lord of the Vats

  Brian Evenson

  Illustrated by Yves Tourigny

  State your name for the record,” said Villads.

  . . .

  “State your name. For the record.”

  What record?

  “Are you having difficulty remembering your name?”

  No, I . . . no . . .

  “State your name—”

  Where am I? Why can’t I see?

  Villads sighed. “You have been injured,” he said.

  I’m blind?

  “Yes.”

  A permanent blindness?

  “No,” said Villads. “Not exactly.”

  Not exactly? What does that mean?

  “Let’s just say that perhaps soon you won’t even remember not being able to see.”

  Esbjorn began to speak. Quickly, Villads cupped his hand over the microphone to prevent the subject from hearing. “Do you really think this is the best way to proceed?” asked Esbjorn. “By lying to the man?”

  “I’m not lying exactly,” said Villads. “And besides, she’s not a man.” He moved his hand away from the microphone. He brought his lips close to it but drew back and cupped the microphone again. “You forget,” he said to Esbjorn in a low voice. “She’s no longer really human at all.”

  Hello, the flat voice said from the speaker affixed in the center of the table. Hello? Is anybody there?

  “We believe you to be Signe,” said Villads when the subject still wasn’t able to produce its own name. “Is this correct?”

  I . . . I don’t know, said the voice.

  Villads grunted. “We have a few questions for you. About what happened.”

  Did something happen?

  Esbjorn leaned forward, gesturing for Villads to hurry the process forward. Kolbjorn, on the other side of the table, remained placid, motionless.

  Did something happen? the voice asked again.

  “You tell me,” said Villads.

  I was . . . I was . . . and then the voice trailed off. Villads waited. The last thing I remember . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  There seems to be something wrong with my memory, the voice finally said.

  “Something wrong with your memory?”

  “I told you this was useless,” whispered Esbjorn. “The brain was too compromised.”

  There are . . . holes . . . gaps . . .

  “Memory loss is normal after trauma,” said Villads.

  Across the table, Kolbjorn frowned.

  Trauma? asked the voice.

  “Take your time,” said Villads, not meeting Kolbjorn’s gaze.

  For a long time, the voice said nothing at all. And then she—or it—said, I can’t seem to feel anything. Why can’t I feel anything? Have I been drugged? Am I still suspended in a vat? Have you warmed me sufficiently to make me barely conscious?

  Villads looked at Kolbjorn. The latter hesitated a moment, then
said, “Tell her.”

  Tell me what? asked the voice.

  “You’re not in a storage vat,” said Villads.

  Then where?

  “There’s been an accident,” said Villads.

  An accident? What kind of accident?

  “You’re nowhere,” said Villads. “Technically speaking, you’re not even alive.”

  I . . . I . . . technically speaking?

  “Something killed you,” said Villads. “Your body was frozen after the hull was breached but quickly enough to be left relatively intact. We were able to make a scan of your brain. An impression.”

  I’m a scan?

  “You weren’t the only one killed,” said Esbjorn. “All the functioning crew was killed and many of the storage vats were destroyed as well. Systems are down in much of the ship. A long tear along the hull. Did you see what made it? We need to know what made it.”

  “And if it’s still here,” said Kolbjorn.

  “And if it’s still here,” agreed Esbjorn.

  “Can you help us?” asked Villads.

  . . .

  “Signe,” said Villads.

  . . .

  “Signe?”

  II.

  After a few more attempts to hail her, he switched off the microphone. “Any suggestions?” Villads asked the others.

  Esbjorn shrugged. “What can we do? We don’t even know what tore open the ship. Maybe we shouldn’t assume it was a motivated attack. It could have been a meteoroid or some similar large chunk of celestial debris.”

  “Doubtful,” said Villads. “The tear isn’t right. Besides, the ship would have detected it and woken us up.”

  Said Esbjorn, “A meteoroid going fast enough might have—”

  “There’s an entrance wound in the hull but no exit wound,” said Villads. “And no sign of whatever struck us. Why not? No, this is something else.”

  “Maybe some sort of displacement,” began Esbjorn, “an object flickering between—”

  Kolbjorn cut him off. “No,” he said. “Villads is right.”

  Esbjorn look at his twin. For a moment his lips began to curl and Villads believed he was about to start yelling, but then suddenly his mouth relaxed. “All right,” he said. “Fine. In any case, whatever remains of Signe doesn’t know anything.”

  “No,” said Villads. “Brain compromised, I suppose.”

  “Or maybe it caught her unawares,” said Kolbjorn. “Maybe she never saw it.”

  “You might as well erase her,” said Esbjorn.

  Again, Kolbjorn countermanded his twin. “Keep her for now, just in case.”

  Villads nodded.

  “So what do we do?” asked Esbjorn.

  “We’ll have to go look for ourselves,” said Villads.

  “Which of us should go?” asked Esbjorn. “Shall we draw straws?”

  “I don’t know where we’d find straws aboard the bridge,” said Kolbjorn.

  “Rock, paper, scissors?” asked Esbjorn.

  “What’s that?” asked Villads.

  “You don’t know rock, paper, scissors?”

  “I’ll go,” said Villads. “I volunteer.”

  “Why you?” asked Esbjorn.

  “Because I’m alive,” said Villads.

  “And I’m not?” asked Esbjorn.

  Villads turned to him. “No, you’re not.”

  “Then what am I?” asked Esbjorn, crossing his arms.

  “A construct,” said Villads.

  He guffawed. “Like Signe?”

  Villads shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “Signe was a construct from a recent scan, incomplete. You’re a full impression, exactly as you were just before you were placed in storage.” He reached out and passed his hand through the hologram that was Esbjorn, his fingers disappearing within the man’s chest without disrupting the image.

  “Then why activate us at all?” asked Kolbjorn. “Clearly we would know nothing about the accident.”

  Villads shrugged. “Another set of minds,” he said. “Someone to help me think through the problem.”

  “Then why not simply wake us up?” asked Kolbjorn. And then his expression crumpled. “Oh God,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Villads again.

  “What?” asked Esbjorn. “What is it?”

  “We’re dead,” said Kolbjorn. “Are we dead?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Villads.

  Esbjorn started to speak, and Kolbjorn, too, but Villads had already begun to manipulate the console in a way that first slowed their constructs, then froze them, then made them disappear entirely. Soon, he was alone on the bridge.

  III.

  For the past week, Villads had been awake and alone on the Vorag. Seven days ago, he had been jerked out of suspension by the sound of a siren blaring, despite the muffling effect of the fluid surrounding him. Just coming conscious, he was dimly aware of a dark shape passing his vat. Was he meant to wake up? He didn’t think so; it didn’t feel right, but he was awake nonetheless.

  And then the shape had passed by him again, or part of it had—a leg or a tentacle or something in between, impossible in the darkness to tell, and he realized the vat was on its side. He’d begun to breathe, the alarm going off now not only in the ship at large but also in his tank. He was hyperventilating, breathing too quickly for the tube to provide him sufficient oxygen. He pounded on the translucent curve of the vat, but nothing happened. The vat wall was too strong, his fist pushing through the viscous fluid too slowly. He pounded again. His vision started to blur, darkness gathering around its edges, and he knew he’d soon go under again. Or maybe, he wasn’t really awake after all; maybe, this was all a dream.

  And then something curious happened. The thick glass of the vat spidered over with tendrils of frost, a rapidly expanding network of cracks. He struck out again, and this time the vat shattered, spilling him and a wash of fluid out onto the deck. He was shivering, unable to breathe. There was the airlock to the bridge, just beside him—by luck his vat was positioned close to it, and in falling onto its side had fallen in the right direction. He managed to half-roll, half-slide himself into it and, vomiting and shaking, to trigger the airlock door to close.

  The blowers came on. He coughed and vomited up skeins of fluid. Someone was mumbling; it took him some time to realize it was him.

  After a while, he stopped shivering. After a while, he managed to stand.

  He had only been in the airless cold a few seconds, but how he was not dead he couldn’t say. His extremities were numb. He would go on to lose an ear, and a week later would still only have partial feeling in his extremities.

  He stood and looked through the thick porthole set in the airlock’s steel door. The overhead lights had gone out, leaving only the faint glow of the emergency panels.

  “Vorag, extinguish the airlock lights,” he said to the ship.

  The airlock fell dark. Slowly, his eyes adjusted until through the porthole he could see a vague but extensive destruction, vats shattered and overturned, bodies frozen and petrified, a huge gash in the hull through which he could glimpse unfamiliar stars.

  He stumbled to the bridge. No one was there, not a single member of the skeleton crew intended to convey them to their destination. For a time, he just lay there, breathing, and then he managed to get up and examine the control panels. They were still seventy-one years, five months, and thirteen days out: still a lifetime shy of arrival. What had stopped them? What had torn them open? The Vorag didn’t seem to know.

  The sensors showed a large tear in the ship’s hull. They indicated all three compartments containing vats had been breached. He adjusted the sensors. No signs of life. Or rather, one sign of life: him, alone on the bridge.

  Maybe this was a mistake. Possibly it was simply a question of sensor failure. Possibly there was a compartment somewhere where he’d find members of the skeleton crew holed up and without pressure suits, trying to figure out a way to get back to the bridge. Or perhaps, at the least,
a few vats remained intact. The sensors might not be able to detect signs of life from the vats since those lives were, for all intents and purposes, suspended.

  No, he told himself, it can’t be just me. Probably the sensors were down and crew were trapped in a portion of the ship sealed shut because of the tear. He would go out and look and find them. And together they would figure out what to do.

  He removed a pressure suit from the cabinet and climbed into it. It was painful, his body still throbbing, but he managed. The suit had an interior emergency rations pack, and by pulling his arm out of its sleeve and into the suit proper, he managed to break the pack open and thread the straw up to his lips. He was surprised by how good the paste tasted until he realized it had been quite literally years since he had eaten anything.

  He made his way back into the bridge’s airlock. Switching on the suit’s light, he sealed the lock, let it depressurize, and stepped out through the other lock.

  No sound other than his own breathing and his magnetic soles clicking against the deck and disengaging as he raised them. His breathing was ragged and harsh, the click of the soles blunted as if heard from a great distance, as if his body was miles high. No atmosphere here, but he knew that already. And insanely cold, but that was what the pressure suit was designed for.

  The damage was much worse than he’d expected. The vats should have withstood the cold, but they had not—age, maybe, or the rapidity with which the temperature had changed or something else entirely. In some places, they were not only cracked but overturned, broken apart. Bodies were strewn around as well, frozen in unnatural postures like fallen statues. They were all nude, an indication they belonged to the vats, the legions of the stored. None of the bodies of the crew in sight. How many had there been? A dozen? Why was he not seeing any?

  He made his way systematically down the rows of the thousands of vats. More corpses, more shattered casings. How could it be that no casing was intact, not a single one?