New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Part 31

After a moment's consideration, he adds the no-longer-cold vial with the nodule, also.

Slam. Not a storm, no, not on this calm ocean, in this calm night, among the painted hulls of the fishing boats tied up snug to the pier. But something tremendous, surging towards Harding, as if he were pursued by a giant transparent bubble. The shining iridescent wall of it, catching rainbow just as it does in the Audobon image, is burned into his vision as if with silver nitrate. Is he dreaming? He must be dreaming; he was in his bed in his pinstriped blue cotton flannel pajamas only a moment ago, lying awake, rubbing the numb fingertips of his left hand together. Now, he ducks away from the rising monster and turns in futile panic.

He is not surprised when he does not make it.

The blow falls soft, as if someone had thrown a quilt around him. He thrashes though he knows it's hopeless, an atavistic response and involuntary.

His flesh should burn, dissolve. He should already be digesting in the monster's acid body. Instead, he feels coolness, buoyancy. No chance of light beyond reflexively closed lids. No sense of pressure, though he imagines he has been taken deep. He's as untouched within it as Burt's lobster pots.

He can only hold his breath out for so long. It's his own reflexes and weaknesses that will kill him.

In just a moment, now.

He surrenders, allows his lungs to fill.

And is surprised, for he always heard that drowning was painful. But there is pressure, and cold, and the breath he draws is effortful, for certain- -but it does not hurt, not much, and he does not die.

Command, the shoggoth-what else could be speaking?-says in his ear, buzzing like the manifold voice of a hive.

Harding concentrates on breathing. On the chill pressure on his limbs, the overwhelming flavor of licorice. He knows they use cold packs to calm hysterics in insane asylums; he never thought the treatment anything but quackery. But the chilly pressure calms him now.

Command, the shoggoth says again.

Harding opens his eyes and sees as if through thousands. The shoggoths have no eyes, exactly, but their hide is all eyes; they see, somehow, in every direction as once. And he is seeing not only what his own vision reports, or that of this shoggoth, but that of shoggoths all around. The sessile and the active, the blooming and the dormant. They are all one.

His right hand pushes through resisting jelly. He's still in his pajamas, and with the logic of dreams the vial from under his pillow is clenched in his fist. Not the gun, unfortunately, though he's not at all certain what he would do with it if it were. The nodule shimmers now, with submarine witchlight, trickling through his fingers, limning the palm of his hand.

What he sees-through shoggoth eyes-is an incomprehensible tapestry. He pushes at it, as he pushes at the gelatin, trying to see only with his own eyes, to only see the glittering vial.

His vision within the thing's body offers unnatural clarity. The angle of refraction between the human eye and water causes blurring, and it should be even more so within the shoggoth. But the gla.s.s in his hand appears crisper.

Command, the shoggoth says, a third time.

"What are you?" Harding tries to say, through the fluid clogging his larynx.

He makes no discernable sound, but it doesn't seem to matter. The shoggoth shudders in time to the pulses of light in the nodule. Created to serve, it says.

Purposeless without you.

And Harding thinks, How can that be?

As if his wondering were an order, the shoggoths tell.

Not in words, precisely, but in pictures, images-that textured jumbled tapestry. He sees, as if they flash through his own memory, the bulging radially symmetrical shapes of some prehistoric animal, like a squat tentacular barrel grafted to a pair of giant starfish. Makers. Masters.

The shoggoths were engineered. And their creators had not permitted them to think, except for at their bidding. The basest slave may be free inside his own mind-but not so the shoggoths. They had been laborers, construction equipment, shock troops. They had been dread weapons in their own selves, obedient chattel. Immortal, changing to suit the task of the moment.

This selfsame shoggoth, long before the reign of the dinosaurs, had built structures and struck down enemies that Harding did not even have names for. But a coming of the ice had ended the civilization of the Masters, and left the shoggoths to retreat to the fathomless sea while warm-blooded mammals overran the earth. There, they were free to converse, to explore, to philosophize and build a culture. They only returned to the surface, vulnerable, to bloom.

It is not mating. It's mutation. As they rest, sunning themselves upon the rocks, they create themselves anew. Self-evolving, when they sit tranquil each year in the sun, exchanging information and control codes with their brothers.

Free, says the shoggoth mournfully. Like all its kind, it is immortal.

It remembers.

Harding's fingertips tingle. He remembers beaded ridges of hard black keloid across his grandfather's back, the shackle galls on his wrists. Harding locks his hand over the vial of light, as if that could stop the itching. It makes it worse.

Maybe the nodule is radioactive.

Take me back, Harding orders. And the shoggoth breaks the surface, cresting like a great rolling wave, water cutting back before it as if from the prow of a ship. Harding can make out the lights of Pa.s.samaquoddy Harbor. The chill sticky sensation of gelatin-soaked cloth sliding across his skin tells him he's not dreaming.

Had he come down through the streets of the town in the dark, barefoot over frost, insensibly sleepwalking? Had the shoggoth called him?

Put me ash.o.r.e.

The shoggoth is loathe to leave him. It clings caressingly, stickily. He feels its tenderness as it draws its colloid from his lungs, a horrible loving sensation.

The shoggoth discharges Harding gently onto the pier.

Your command, the shoggoth says, which makes Harding feel sicker still.

I won't do this. Harding moves to stuff the vial into his sodden pocket, and realizes that his pajamas are without pockets. The light spills from his hands; instead, he tucks the vial into his waistband and pulls the pajama top over it. His feet are numb; his teeth rattle so hard he's afraid they'll break. The sea wind knifes through him; the spray might be needles of shattered gla.s.s.

Go on, he tells the shoggoth, like shooing cattle. Go on!

It slides back into the ocean as if it never was.

Harding blinks, rubbed his eyes to clear slime from the lashes. His results are astounding. His tenure a.s.sured. There has to be a way to use what he's learned without returning the shoggoths to bondage.

He tries to run back to the Inn, but by the time he reaches it, he's staggering. The porch door is locked; he doesn't want to pound on it and explain himself. But when he stumbles to the back, he finds that someone-probably himself, in whatever entranced state in which he left the place-fouled the latch with a slip of notebook paper. The door opens to a tug, and he climbs the back stair doubled over like a child or an animal, hands on the steps, toes so numb he has to watch where he puts them.

In his room again, he draws a hot bath and slides into it, hoping by the grace of G.o.d that he'll be spared pneumonia.

When the water has warmed him enough that his hands have stopped shaking, Harding reaches over the cast-iron edge of the tub to the slumped pile of his pajamas and fumbles free the vial. The nugget isn't glowing now.

He pulls the cork with his teeth; his hands are too clumsy. The nodule is no longer cold, but he still tips it out with care.

Harding thinks of himself, swallowed whole. He thinks of a shoggoth bigger than the Bluebird, bigger than Burt Clay's lobster boat The Blue Heron. He thinks of die Unterseatboote. He thinks of refugee flotillas and trench warfare and roiling soupy palls of mustard gas. Of Britain and France at war, and Roosevelt's neutrality.

He thinks of the perfect weapon.

The perfect slave.

When he rolls the nodule across his wet palm, ice rimes to its surface. Command? Obedient. Sounding pleased to serve.

Not even free in its own mind.

He rises from the bath, water rolling down his chest and thighs. The nodule won't crush under his boot; he will have to use the pliers from his collection kit. But first, he reaches out to the shoggoth.

At the last moment, he hesitates. Who is he, to condemn a world to war? To the chance of falling under the sway of empire? Who is he to salve his conscience on the backs of suffering shopkeepers and pharmacists and children and mothers and schoolteachers? Who is he to impose his own ideology over the ideology of the shoggoth?

Harding scrubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth, chasing the faint anise aftertaste of shoggoth. They're born slaves. They want to be told what to do.

He could win the war before it really started. He bites his lip. The taste of his own blood, flowing from cracked, chapped flesh, is as sweet as any fruit of the poison tree.

I want you to learn to be free, he tells the shoggoth. And I want you to teach your brothers.

The nodule crushes with a sound like powdering gla.s.s.

"Eyah, eyah. Fata gun eyah," Harding whispers. "Eyah, eyah, the master comes no more."

WESTERN UNION.

1938 NOV 12 AM 06 15.

NA1906 21 2 YA Pa.s.sAMAQUODDY MAINE 0559A.

DR LESTER GREENE=WILBERFORCE OHIO=.

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY PLEASE ACCEPT RESIGNATION STOP ENROUTE INSTANTLY TO FRANCE TO ENLIST STOP PROFOUNDEST APOLOGIES STOP PLEASE FORWARD BELONGINGS TO MY MOTHER IN NY ENDIT.

HARDING.

It seemed to be half lost in a queer antarctic haze. . . The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset.

At the Mountains of Madness H.P. Lovecraft (1931).

* COLD WATER SURVIVAL *

Holly Phillips.

November 11:.

Cutter is dead and I don't know what to feel. Andy is crying and Miguel is making solemn noises about the tragedy, but I think they're acting. Not their grief-that's real-but their response to it. I think they're just playing to what's expected out there in the world. I can't, and I don't think Del can either. I've seen the shining in his eyes, and it isn't tears. There's a kind of excitement in the air, the thrill of big events, important times: death. It's a first for all of us. For Cutter too.

[The viewer of the digital video camera is like a small window onto the past, shining blue in the dull red shade of my tent.]

There's a sliver of indigo sky, and the white glare of snow, and the far horizon of ocean like a dark wall closing us in. There are the climbers, incongruous as candy wrappers in their red and yellow cold-weather gear. But they're like old-time explorers too, breath frosting their new beards and snow shades hiding their eyes. [Only because I know them do I recognize Cutter on the left in yellow, Del on the right in red.] Their voices reach the small mic through gusts of wind so strong it sways the videographer [me], making the scene tilt as if the vast iceberg rose and fell like a ship to the ocean swells. It doesn't. Bigger than Denmark, Atlantis takes the heavy Antarctic waves without a tremor. But this is summer, and we haven't had any major storms yet.

I can hear them panting through my earbuds, Cutter and Del digging down to firm ice where they can anchor their ropes. Rock can be treacherous; ice more so; surface ice that's had exposure to sun and wind most of all. They hack away with their axes, taking their time. Bored, the videographer turns away to film a slow circle: the dark line of the creva.s.se, the trampled snow, the colorful camp of snow tents, disa.s.sembled pre-fab huts, crated supplies, and floatation-bagged gear. I remember with distaste the dirty frontier mess of McMurdo Station, an embarra.s.sment on the stark black-white-blue face of the continent, but I can sympathize, too. The blankness of this huge chunk of broken ice sheet is daunting. It's nice to have something human around to rest your eyes on.

Full circle: the climbers are setting their screws. They aren't roped together, ice is too untrustworthy. The videographer approaches the near side of the creva.s.se as they come up to the far lip, ready to descend. Their crampons kick ice shards into the sunlight: the focus narrows: spike-clad boots, ice-spray, the white wall of ice descending into blue shadow. The climbers make the transition from the horizontal surface to the vertical, as graceless as penguins getting to the edge of the water, and then start the smooth bounding motion of the rappel. The lip of the creva.s.se cuts off the view. [A blip of blackness.] A better angle, almost straight down: the videographer has lain down to aim the camera over the edge. The climbers bound down, the fun of the descent yet to be paid for by the long vertical climb of the return. The playback is nothing but flickering light, but in it is encoded the smell of ancient ice, the sting of sunlight on the back of my neck. I must have sensed those things, but I didn't notice them at the time. I didn't notice, either, that I only watched the descent through the tiny window of the camera in my hand.

They're only twenty meters down when Cutter's screws give way. s.h.i.t, he says, Del- And he takes a hack with his axes, but the ice is bad and the force of his blows tips him back, away from the wall-his crampons caught for another instant, so it's like he's standing on an icy floor where Del is bounding four-limbed like an ape, swinging left on his rope, dropping one ax to make a grab-and the camera catches the moment when the coiling rope slaps the failed screw into Cutter's helmet, but he's falling anyway by then. Del looses the brakes on his rope and falls beside him, above him, reaching, but there's still friction on his rope and anyway, no one can fall faster than gravity. Cutter, says the videographer, and the camera view spins wide as she finally looks down with her own eyes. The camera doesn't see it, and I don't now except in memory. The conclusion happens off-screen, and we, the camera and I, are left staring at the creva.s.se wall across the way.

And so it's only now, in my red tent that's still bright in the polar absence of night, that I see it-them-the shapes in the ice.

November 12: We spent the morning sawing out a temporary grave, and then we laid Cutter, shrouded in his sleeping bag, into the snow. It was a horrible job. Cutter, my friend, the first dead person I'd laid hands on. It should have been solemn, I know, and I have somewhere inside me a loving grief, but Christ, manhandling that stiff broken corpse into the rescue sled, limbs at all the wrong angles and that face with the staring eyes and gaping shatter-toothed mouth. Oh Cutter, I thought, stop, don't do this to me. Stop being dead? Don't inflict your death on me? On any of us, I guess, himself included. I hated to do it, but the others aren't climbers, so it was Del and me, all too painfully conscious of how bad the ice could be. We made a painstaking axes-and-screws descent, crampons kicking in until they'll bear your weight, not trusting the rope as you dig the axes in. In spite of everything, it was a good climb, no problems at all, but there was Cutter waiting at the bottom for us. His frozen blood was red as paint on the ice-boulders that choked the throat of the creva.s.se.

It was so blue. Ice like fossilized snow made as hard and clear as gla.s.s by the vast weight and the uncountable years. An eon of ice pressed from the heart of the continent, out into the enormous ice sheet that is breaking up now, possibly for the first time since humans have been around, and sending its huge fragments north to melt into the oceans of the world. Fragments of which Atlantis is only one, though the only inhabited one. Like a real country now, we have not only a population but a graveyard, a history, too.

And an argument. Andy made her case for withdrawal-playing the role, I thought, that began with her tears-but none of us, not even her, had thought to call in the fatality the day it happened. "Why not?" I asked, and n.o.body had an answer for me. "Why didn't you?" said Miguel, but I hadn't meant to accuse. I had wanted someone to give me an answer for my actions, my non-action. Not reporting the death will mean trouble and we're already renegades, tolerated by the Antarctic policy-makers only because no one has ever staked a claim on an iceberg before. We set up McMurdo's weather station and satellite tracking gear and promised them our observations, but we aren't scientists, we're just adventurers, coming along for the ride. And now Cutter's dead, out here in international waters, and though I guess the Australians will want some answers at some point-I know his parents will-Oz is a long way away. I almost said, Earth is a long way away. Earth is, dirt is, far from this land of ice and sea and sky.

[Camera plugged into laptop, laptop sucking juice from the solar panels staring blankly at the perpetual northern sun.]

I watch the fall, doing penance for my curiosity. My own recorded breath is loud in my earbuds. The camera's view flings itself in a blurry arc and then automatically focuses on the far wall. Newer ice, that's really compacted snow, is opaquely white, glistening as the fierce sun melts the molecular surface. Deeper, it begins to clarify, taking on a blue tone as the ice catches and bends the light. Deeper yet, it's so dark a blue you could be forgiven for thinking it's opaque again, but it's even clearer now, all the air pressed out by millennia of snow falling one weightless flake at a time. Some light must filter through the upper ice because the shapes [I pause] are not merely surface shapes, but recede deep into the iceberg's heart.

Glaciers (of which Atlantis was one) form in layers, one season's snow falling on the last, so they are horizontally stratified. But glaciers also move, flowing down from the inland heights of the continent, and that movement over uneven ground breaks vertical fault lines like this creva.s.se all through the vast body of ice. So any glacial ice-face is going to bear a complex stratigraphy, a sculpting of horizontal and vertical lines. This is part of ice's beauty, this sculptural richness of form, color, light, that can catch your heart and make you ache with wonder. And because it is the kind of harmony artists strive for, it's easy to see the hand of an artist in what lies before you.

But no. I've seen the wind-carved hoodoos in the American southwest and I've seen the vast stone heads of Rapa Nui, and I know the difference between the imagination that draws a figure out of natural shapes and the potent recognition of the artifact. These shapes [I zoom 20%, 40%] in the ice have all the mystery and meaning of Mayan glyphs, at once angular and organic, three-dimensional, fitting together as much like parts in a machine as words on a page. What are they? I've been on glaciers from the Rockies to the Andes and I've never seen anything like this. My hands itch for my rope and my axes. I want to see what's really there.

November 13: I wondered if Del would object to another climb-he came up from retrieving Cutter stunned and pale-but the big argument came from Miguel who talked about safety and responsibility to the group. I said, "Have you looked at the pictures?" and he said, "All I see is ice." But Miguel's a sailor, one of the around-the-world-in-a-tiny-boat-alone kind, and ice is what he keeps his daily catch in. Andy said he had a point about safety, if things go really wrong we're going to need one another, but she kept giving my laptop uneasy looks, knowing she'd seen something inexplicable.

I said, "Isn't this why we're here? To explore?"

"What if it's important?" Andy said, changing tack. "What if it really is something? The scientists should be studying it, not us."

"Ice formations," Miguel said. "How important is that? It's all going to melt in the end."

"Are we always going to argue like this?" This from Del. "If we're going to quit, then let's get on the satellite phone and get the helo back here to pick us up."

"I'm just saying," Miguel said, but Del cut him off.

"No. We knew why we were doing this when we started. I hate that Cutter's dead, but I wouldn't have come to begin with if we'd laid different ground rules, and if we're going to change now I don't want to be here. I've got other things to do."

I backed him up. This was supposed to be our big lawless adventure, colonizing a chunk of unreal estate that's going to melt away to nothing in a couple of years-not for nationalism or wealth-maybe for fame a little-but mostly because we wanted to be outside the rules, on the far side of every border in the world. Which is, I said, where death lies, too.

Taking it too far, as usual. Andy gave me another of those who-are-you looks, but I fixed her with a look of my own. "Get beyond it," I said. "Get beyond it, or why the h.e.l.l are we here?"

And then I remembered why these people are my closest friends, my chosen family, because they did finally give up the good-citizen roles and tapped into that excitement that was charging the air. Most people would think us heartless, inhuman, but a real climber would understand: we loved Cutter more, not less, by moving on. Going beyond, as he has already done.

So Del and I roped up again and went down.

[The images come in sc.r.a.ps and fragments as the videographer starts and stops the camera.]

The angle of light changes with the spinning of the iceberg in the circ.u.mpolar current. For this brief hour it slices into the depths of the creva.s.se, almost perfectly aligned with the break in the ice. So is the wind, the constant hard westerly that blows across the mic, a deep hollow bl.u.s.tering. Ice chips shine in the sunlight as they flee the climber's crampons kicking into the creva.s.se wall. The tethered rope trails down into the broken depths. Everywhere is ice.

[blip]

The creva.s.se wall in close up. Too close. [The videographer leans out from a three-point anchor: one ax, two t.i.tanium-bladed feet.] Light gleams from the surface, ice coated in a molecule-thick skin of melt water, shining. All surface, no depth. s.h.i.t, the videographer [me] says. Look, the other climber [Del] says. The camera eye turns toward him, beard and shades and helmet. He points out of the frame. A dizzying turn, the bright gulf of the creva.s.se, the far wall. More shapes, and Christ they're big. The creva.s.se is only three meters wide at this point, and measuring them against a climber's length, they're huge, on the order of cars and buses, great whites and orca whales.

[blip]