by J L Forrest
An insane number of women.
I wondered why.
Was the answer anthropological? Something to do with having survived the traumas of the last few years and now finding themselves in relative safety?
Was the answer evolutionary? Something engrained in humans which, after a catastrophic collapse of population, raises fertility rates?
I never answered the question. In the months preceding my mission, I’d simply been too busy for follow my curiosity.
XV. Visions, Part V
The rain slaps my face, seeping heat from my breath, my throat, my chest, leaving me trembling. I work the ship’s rudder, steering into the wind, forcing us perpendicular to the relentless, titanic waves. Their foam-flecked black waters arch like beasts, hateful dragons, and each time our ship’s prow climbs vertical, the angry clouds confront me. Lightning knifes them, leaving impossible afterimages—elephantine rams whose gigantic horns spiral through the mists, rams yoked to a war chariot, rams driven by a God whose hammer sparks fire.
The wave drops and our clinker vessel slams down with it, traversing the waterscape, the living mountains of brine and slithering valleys of foam. By each gunwale, a dozen men row, two to an oar, a dozen oars beating the surface again, again, again. These men, bred for the waves, their muscles sculpted for this work, they shake off the storm, their only purpose to carry us through it.
Some wear the antlers of the Horned Lords.
Husbands to the Queens.
At the prow stands a boy, ten or eleven years old, fair-haired and steady. The rain lashes him but does not bend him. Once more, lightning thrashes the sky, the ship cresting a wave only to rush downward again.
The boy looks over his shoulder at me, at the men. “Forward!” he screams, his voice carrying over the thunder.
Another swell, and for a heartbeat we hang weightless, risk capsizing. The ship groans, its rivets sing, and the men grunt with every pull. We mount the wave and tilt forward, gazing into an inky maelstrom.
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh,” the boy cries out, a thunder crash muffling his words, “wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
His peculiar gray-green eyes reflect the lightning.
From the maelstrom emerges a grotesquerie carved from nightmares and wrongnesses, a waxy and leathery expansiveness of blubbery masses, of pseudopods, of innumerable eyes. Its jet flesh glistens and, in the wet reflection of thunderbolts, it uncoils from the abyss and transfixes us in its multitudinous gaze. Its chest-shaking shriek deafens me to the cascading thunder.
Its writhing bulk lifts from the water, dwarfing our ship, the waves, the maelstrom, until the lightning-thorned clouds become its crown. Its stink pollutes the winds but, more profound, its otherworldliness rolls stingingly across our vessel.
Toxic to life.
Offensive to our senses.
Poisonous to our thoughts.
It is a mind, and its mind crushes ours.
Its eyes penetrate me, probe me, scour me inside-out. Is that me screaming? Is the warmth between my legs my urine? I release the rudder and our ship flounders.
The grotesquerie lifts us into the sky. One man leaps overboard, vanishes. Others cry or cower. The Horned Lords lift their spears and attempt some formation.
“Cthulhu nei fhtagn!” shouts the boy.
This Great Old One splinters the ship and I am—
—falling—
—forever.
2131.4.12.5:12 PST
58°16’06.8”N 134°10’11.6”W
Alt 376m
Southeast Alaska (Dissolved)
Tongass
18km to Destination
With a gasping breath I wake.
The baby still sleeps.
A sense of drowning passes from me, a fading and fevered dream. A Harque seldom forgets, but this dream slides from me, fish-slippery, desperate to wriggle from my brain and return to the currents of my subconsciousness.
Hot sweat coats me and I unzip my sleeping bag, craving cooler air. Sol remains below the horizon, but the sky has lightened to a ubiquitous gray.
Rain pelts the tent. For more than twenty-four hours, rainstorms have doused the mountains and forests, the drainages rush with water, and the skies roil with shades of slate and charcoal. The deluge sharpens the scents of pine and fern, and the entire land smells alive.
While still sheltered, I tend the baby, set the dirty diaper outside, and manage a feeding. The supply of formula is dwindling but still ample. At least my backpack is getting lighter. Lotion, talc, and medicines are in good order. The poor little guy’s thighs are red, and today I’ll try carrying him differently.
In the rain there’s no clean way to pack. The best I can do is attempt to keep mud from the tent’s interior. By the time I’ve bundled everything, the day has brightened as much as it’s likely to, and the Horned Lord awaits, his gear on his back. He leans on his long spear while rain pours through his hair, beads across his face, and soaks his beard.
“Ready?” he asks.
I nod.
To the southeast, hundreds of meters down, the Taku Inlet peeks through a fog. Taku, named by the Tlingit tribe who once lived here, before the Americans, before the Russians. I don’t know if there are any Tlingit left alive. I hope there are.
Today, the Horned Lord and I will round a promontory at the southwest foot of Mt. Roberts. The going will be slow but, by nightfall, we’ll have dropped nearer the Gastineau Channel and, with any luck, we’ll cross by ferry to Douglas Island.
To New Juneau.
Before we rejoin the road, I adjust my pack and cradle the baby’s side against my chest. He’s suckling a pacifier, and I keep him close, sharing my warmth. Louder than the rain, the cawing of ravens echoes through the forest, and twice more I spot that eagle-sized specimen.
The Horned Lord says, “That’s Nevermore.” He laughs. “You’re blessed, atheist, that he should show any interest in you.”
The bird takes wing, joins his kin, and disappears into the fog.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because Nevermore is the Queens’ familiar.”
“Like a witch’s pet?”
He grunts, though whether deriding me or agreeing, I can’t tell.
“If they didn’t already know you’re here, atheist, they do now.”
Then I notice, obvious as it is, for the first time—the darkened, saturated, rain-soaked green of the forest overlies an even darker color.
Violet.
Everywhere, so subtle but ubiquitous as to have been rendered transparent, perhaps invisible in the dry conditions of the last few days. The rains reveal it.
It shimmers through the forest’s dappled emeralds and browns. I’ve never experienced this color before, not in any digital imagery, not in the natural spectra of any biome in any terraria managed by the Avidità Corporation. I crouch by the roadside and run my fingertips across a growth of fireweed, let two leaves rest against my pale fingertips.
Over several minutes, the leaves grow visibly, by millimeters.
“This isn’t possible,” I say.
In this downpour the woodland stretches and reaches, whispering as it does, creeping more like a slow animal than any vegetation. How does this biome process carbon so rapidly? Where does the nitrogen come from? Neither the laws of thermodynamics nor any biological theory accounts for this much growth so quickly.
The Horned Lord moseys down the road. “Keep telling yourself that, atheist. Come on. This day will be over before you know it.”
XVI. It’s All Wars
Recollected
2131.2.14.4:22 GMT
Alt 40.0E6m
High Earth Orbit
EIK-Cel Station
Bringing roses in a glass vase, that seemed a kind gesture to me. Despite their fleeting existence, there’s a lasting poetry in roses:
The soft beauty of their petals. A soothing pink, in this case.
The hard sharpness of their thorns.
The pleasure of their scent.
The discus’s lower levels housed offices for routine visits, wellness exams, and urgent care. With few exceptions, AIs administered residents’ diagnostics, traced epidemiological trends, and managed scheduling, but the need for interpersonal connection remained, and doctors provided a valuable checksum to the AIs’ overall system.
I bypassed these levels, glancing at everyday people as they waited for their appointments. In Station’s controlled environs, few injuries required long-term attention but prevention mattered more than ever. Everyone saw their doctor at least twice per year.
Communicable diseases posed the greatest risks.
A lift brought me to the higher levels, where I walked by facilities which grew organs for transplants, which housed vacuum-sterile surgical theaters, which directed some of Avidità Corporation’s medical experiments. On these levels, too, a handful of mental-healthcare facilities housed patients whose conditions puzzled the most advanced twenty-second-century technologies.
The facility’s chief medical officer, Dr. Tulaja Chowdhury, met me. From her file I knew her to be sixty-eight years old, though she passed for early thirties. She shook my hand, her demeanor affable, welcoming, and professional. Her offices were clean, inviting, and tastefully designed, with touches of Hindu decor—a sculpture of the Goddess Parvati, a procession of Asian elephants carved from sisso wood, a tapestry depicting the epics of Ganesh.
“Mr. Aurelius, it’s a pleasure to receive you.”
I smiled but shook my head. “Aurelius will do, no mister necessary. Thank you. I realize my request is unusual.”
“Not at all. Any requests from Mr. Avidità’s representatives are our duty. We’re here because of him.”
“Thank you.”
“Ms. Watson is particularly lucid today. You’re in luck.” Dr. Chowdhury’s attention shifted to the bouquet, whose vase I tucked against my left side. “What are those?”
“Roses.”
“I know what they are, Aurelius, but what do you intend to do with them?”
“Ms. Watson’s file indicated she likes roses. I thought they might make a friendly gesture.”
“You cannot take the glass in with you.”
“All right.”
“I’m afraid I can’t let you give her the stems either.”
Dr. Chowdhury stepped back from me, studying me like a fashion designer might study a runway model. “None of your clothes are appropriate. Your belt, your shoes, the heavy fabric of your pants.”
“Why?”
“For example, your belt—woven fiber, isn’t it?”
“Hydroponic cotton,” I said, proud because it’d come from a facility which I helped manage. “Grown in narrow-spectrum darkrooms, not a gram of water or nitrogen lost in the system.”
“Good for you,” said the doctor. “If Cassandra gets hold of it, there’s a chance she’ll strangle you with it. Or me. Or she’ll hang herself.”
“You’re kidding?”
“I’m not,” she said. “We’ve got to get you out of your clothes.”
Cassandra Watson’s living space fit inside a volume seven meters square by 2.5 meters tall. Along one wall, tucked into a raised space, was her bed. Beside it the bathroom had no door and no privacy. One entire wall, being clear diamondide, looked into an alluringly tended garden to which Ms. Watson had no physical access.
I entered wearing what amounted to gossamer underwear and a T-shirt, printed from fabric which anyone could shred. Dr. Chowdhury had reduced the bouquet of roses to their pink petals, which I carried in a water-soluble plastic bowl.
As I stepped through the security lock into Ms. Watson’s domicile, she stood from the floor. She’d been sitting on a cushion, facing her garden. Holograms of her had depicted a thin, birdlike woman with dark eyes and long, sable hair. In person, her hair was shorn within a centimeter of her scalp.
“I appreciate your kind gesture,” she said.
I held out the petals for her. She took the bowl, then in handfuls scattered the contents around her apartment. The petals contrasted starkly the pale carpet, which resembled tatami, though the material was a woven carbon which would be almost impossible to rip from the floor, to unwind, or to burn. Every item in this space, I realized, was either so tough as to be immovable or so frail as to be harmless.
After she’d stippled the floor in petals, Ms. Watson sat again, then gestured to another cushion. I situated it closer to her—not too close—and made myself as comfortable as I could.
“It’s all wars,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s all wars. Up here in your realm in the sky, it’ll be nothing but wars, forever and ever.”
“Is that what you want to talk about?” I asked.
“Isn’t it what you want to talk about?”
“I’m here to talk with you, about you. Why start with wars?”
“It’s true, isn’t it? Thomas Avidità and the other Gods of the New Moons, they hate each other.”
For the first time in my life, I experienced a creeping feeling. Dr. John Bell coined the term in 1815, in his Principles of Surgery, and only later in the writings of the romantics and gothics did it come to mean dread.
Gods of the New Moons, the same turn of phrase I’d used as a boy at a breakfast with Mr. Avidità. As far as I know, no one else had ever heard it.
Dread.
“Why do you call them that?” I asked. “The Gods of the New Moons?”
“That’s what they are, aren’t they?” She picked up one rose petal and tore it slowly into ribbons. “It’s not as if anyone has successfully terraformed a planet, not like Mars or Venus is really occupied. Isn’t that fair to say?”
“There’re colonies,” I said. “Science facilities.”
“Colonies and science facilities don’t amount to much—a few thousand people? That’s not new civilizations.” She chuckled. “Yet the UPRC has got maybe thirty-million civilians in stations not so different from this one, or in converted asteroids like a bunch of shipwreck survivors crammed into life rafts. Thomas Avidità’s got maybe half that. Who the fuck knows how many Nesteler’s got? Might not be more than a few hundred, the goddamned-rich families of their executives and that’s it, because Nesteler wouldn’t give a shit if every other human in existence ceased existing, along with everything else that ever lived, so long as they get theirs.”
“That last part might be true.”
She retrieved another petal, tore it in half. For someone Mr. Avidità described as gibbering and drooling, Cassandra Watson seemed to have plenty to say, was plenty articulate.
“The Gods of the New Moons,” she said, “because that’s all they’ve got, their big claim to fame—a few dozen oversized space stations and some terraria, all orbiting something but not qualifying as much more than satellites. It’s impressive, don’t get me wrong, but really we’re all sitting up here in flimsy-ass tin cans, hoping the UPRC or Nesteler or both don’t attack us, send us careening back to Earth. Brimstone express, going down.”
“You subscribe to the Law of Threes?” I asked.
“Exactly what I’m saying—eagla—that Avidità, Nesteler, and the UPRC will be up here fighting over the resources of System forever.”
“Grim.” Eagla? What had that been?
“As grim as the fact that Nietzschean dominance competition between corporations is what caused the sixth great extinction—uafásach—and made Earth’s surface so unstable as to make ongoing occupation hellish?”
Uafásach?
“Mr. Avidità,” she said, “is a shit stain who was willing to rape and pillage Earth so as to stay competitive with other shit stains. He tells himself he isn’t as bad as the other New Gods, that he cares more, that once he wins the war he’ll make everything right, though Earthside he kept
mining rare-earth minerals and selling consumerist shit nobody actually needed and developing weaponry for fighting his competition. Weaponry, I might add, which turned out far better at killing civilians than wiping out the heads of Nesteler or the UPRC’s Party Leaders. Bás!”
This last word she barked, and I scooted from her. A dozen hidden cameras monitored this space, and orderlies and AIs waited to assist, though I wasn’t too worried—Ms. Watson was human-standard, and on a good day I could bench press three hundred kilos.
“This is fascinating,” I told her, “but I want to talk with you about your time with the Horned Lords, with their Queens, down in Alaska.”
Now it was her turn to sit back, to scoot away. She fidgeted, biting the end of her thumb.
To herself she whispered, “Lies sleeping, lies dreaming, even death may die—”
“Ms. Watson, you were sent to infiltrate New Juneau, to gather information. What did you learn?”
Her gaze slid away and she wouldn’t meet my eye. “Na damáistí,” she said, “what happened is I learned the truth.”
“What truth?”
“The New Gods are a bunch of petulant, egotistical children, and the Old Gods have taken notice. What a mess we’ve made.”
“Mess?”
She wrung her hands and she screamed.
“What do you mean Old Gods?”
She lunged, planting one hand between us, shaking her fist at me. “I’ve seen them, you moron!”
“Seen what? Be specific. Our drones have spotted nothing—”
“The Old Gods hate your drones.”
“—and we’ve certainly picked up no Gods on satellite—”
“But you have!”
“Explain.”
“Twenty-one twenty-nine, October thirty-first, seventeen-twelve.”
“What?”
“Fifty-eight degrees, twelve minutes, thirty-nine seconds north. One hundred thirty-four degrees, thirty-eight minutes, eighteen degrees west. Go look!”
“What’ll I see?” I asked.
