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

by Remy Nakamura

  “No, no, no.” Belis’s voice is distressed. “Captain, we have a situation.”

  The suited figures stumble on, their eyes fixed on the doors and the distant figure of Dr. Erbach.

  Lysa wonders what she will have to put in her report. The situation is bizarre, impossibly irregular.

  “Erbach, what is this?” Belis demands. “Who the hell are these people?”

  “No concern of yours,” the historian says. There is an audible click as he cuts the channel. He begins to move back and forth, walking with an odd hopping motion, his long arms trailing. Puffs of dust rise where his feet scuff the stone floor.

  “Lysa,” says Belis. “Help me. We have to get them back to the ship before they run out of air. We can’t get more than five or six at a time in the lander. It’ll take us forever to move them all.”

  Lysa moves to intercept the closest group of sleepwalkers, but they pay no attention to her. Like automata, they continue toward the doors. When she puts her hand on one’s arm, he brushes it off without looking and keeps walking.

  “Captain, orders?” says Netts on the public channel. There is no response.

  Another of the newcomers shuffles past Lysa. Through the plastic bubble of his helmet, she sees an eerie expression of joy.

  Belis is on her knees, trying to help a yellow-suited figure who has collapsed to the floor. The man’s companions walk on without looking back. Moving with blind purpose, they converge on Dr. Erbach.

  Lysa starts to push her way through the stragglers, heading toward the historian. As observer, she has the authority to demand that he put an end to whatever this is. But the crowd closes in, and she is trapped, blocked by a living wall.

  She is conscious of a low murmur, a vibration carried more through the stone of the floor than the tenuous atmosphere. The people around her begin to sway in time with the muted rhythm, jostling her this way and that.

  Without warning, the man closest to her raises his hands to the neck of his suit. He fumbles for an instant with the collar, gloved fingers feeling for the release snaps. Then he lifts his helmet in both hands. Behind him, others do the same.

  He stands for a few seconds, helmet raised above his head. A ghostly wisp of white vapor spills from his mouth, and ice crystals sparkle on his bluing lips. His eyes cloud over. He takes a step forward and falls.

  It takes only moments. One instant, Lysa is surrounded by living people. The next, she stands in a sea of dead and dying. Above the bodies of his followers, Dr. Erbach raises his hands, ecstatic. He is back on the channel now, shouting words she does not understand.

  She falls to her knees, trying to force a helmet back onto a woman’s head. The helmet she grabs will not fit the collar ring of the woman’s suit. She tries to jam it in place anyway, her vision fogged with tears.

  With her attention fixed on the dying woman, she does not see the doors start to open. Only when she hears Belis scream does she look up in time to see the doors swing wide, the darkness between them filled by a huge shadow.

  * * *

  The screams rouse Merrick from his trance. He stands, dirt drifting from his fingers.

  Above him, a dot of light blazes briefly before dimming until it is no brighter than a spent ember against the jet black of the sky. The radio brings him Rothan’s last exclamation and a final burst of diagnostics, the dying shouts of man and ship cut off simultaneously.

  He breaks into a run, his powered exoskeleton accelerating him toward what is left of his crew. Erbach is shouting something that makes no sense, his babble intercut with Netts’ curses. Static pulses rhythmically, and through someone’s open microphone, Merrick hears the distant stutter of gunfire.

  He follows a trail of bodies. Not all of Erbach’s cultists had the strength to make it all the way to the great doors. Many lie where they have fallen. A few still crawl toward the end of the hall on hands and knees, desperate to join with the god they have raised.

  He passes Belis’s body. Strange growths sprout from her opened chest. By the doors, Netts’s headless suit burns with green fire. Erbach’s followers lie everywhere like windblown leaves. It strikes Merrick that there is something not accidental about the way they have fallen, that their tortured shapes mimic the evil writing on the walls.

  He knows what he will see. He has seen it in his dreams–the sac-like torso, the insectile limbs, and that hideous devil face with its vast black glittering eyes staring down at him with malevolent intelligence. Monstrous wings fill the frame of the doorway where it crouches, half-lost in the deeper darkness behind.

  “He is risen!” Erbach’s triumphant shout fills his ears. The historian is still alive, a tiny dancing figure dwarfed by the monstrosity he has woken. Almost without thinking, Merrick arms the smallest of his weapons, snaps a shot. He sees the round strike home and detonate, but Erbach’s body continues to dance.

  The thing emerges from between the doors, stepping almost daintily among the bodies. It straightens to its full height, shoulders level with the tops of the pillars, and looks down. It studies the pattern of the dead at its feet, its great eyes sparkling.

  It stoops, stretches. With one clawed hand, it picks up Lysa Tallis from where she crouches among the fallen. Her arms and legs move convulsively for a moment before it deftly twists her head from her body and throws the pieces aside.

  * * *

  “You need my assent to end the life of this body and authorize restoration from backup,” Montdarau says. Only a high-level quorum may vote to terminate and renew a living Immortal, and the vote must be unanimous.

  The secretary shakes her head. “Yes to the first,” she says, “but there will be no restoration.”

  Montdarau stares. If the captain is not restored, his timeline will end.

  “The recorded simulacra have been corrupted,” says Hasdrubal in its musical voice.

  “Corrupted?”

  “They exhibit the same madness as the survivor.”

  “That’s impossible.” Backup simulacra of Immortals are stored redundantly, with thousands of copies scattered across the galaxy. Even if one is lost or damaged, there are always others available.

  “Every known copy is unusable. A message arrived from Ultima Sideris just before you landed. Even the backup there is corrupt. The custodian destroyed it to avoid possible contamination.”

  Montdarau tries to imagine what kind of power could reach into a thousand data files scattered across tens of thousands of lightyears and alter every one. It goes beyond science.

  “There is more,” says the secretary.

  “More?”

  She nods to Kamach, who gestures again. The hull of the incubator splits apart, revealing what was hidden before.

  The captain’s naked body is bloated, and the pitted skin has an oily, greenish sheen. Both legs end in swollen stumps a little below the knee. The exposed muscles of the arms are jeweled with oily polyps whose tiny mouths are fringed with minuscule tentacles. The body has, Montdarau sees, both male and female genitalia.

  Embedded in the doughy flesh of the torso are three shrunken shapes that might once have been human heads, their features distorted but still identifiable. Montdarau recognizes the artificer Netts, the supercargo Belis, and the observer Tallis. Their eyes are open, their faces twisted by terror and elation.

  As the covers slide away, the eyes turn toward Montdarau. He sees all three mouths moving in synchrony. At first he can hear nothing, but Kamach waves his hand and a hidden speaker relays the sound, a high insidious whisper that repeats over and over.

  “Iä! Iä! He is coming!” the three mouths chant in harmony. “He is coming.”

  Angus McIntyre’s short fiction has appeared in Abyss & Apex and Black Candies, in the anthologies Humanity 2.0 (Arc Manor/Phoenix Press), Mission: Tomorrow (Baen Books), Principia Ponderosa (Third Flatiron), and Swords & Steam (Flametree Publishing), and on the BoingBoing website. His novella The Warrior Within will be published by Tor.com in late 2017. He is a graduate of the 2
013 Clarion Writer’s Workshop. Born in London, he has also lived in Milan, Brussels, and Paris. He now lives in New York, where he works as a software developer. More information about his writing is available on his website at http://angus.pw/.

  Minor Heresies

  Ada Hoffmann

  Illustrated by Luke Spooner

  Mimoru still remembered Vaur Station, the silvery lab circling an uninhabited water world. Spare, high-ceilinged, soft and clean, yet always crowded. Always the smell and sound of a few too many human bodies-and the Vaurians were human, too, no matter the alien filigree the Gods might have melded with their cells. No matter that the first generation had been grown in vats and that one Vaurian might not look the same from one day to the next. They were human, smelling like sweat and soap, coughing, squabbling, having love affairs, having nightmares. They were men, women, neither, both, and in between, and the glass and steel columns of Vaur Station enclosed them like a cathedral nave. Vaurians were an experiment. The experiment was ongoing.

  Mimoru had not minded being an experiment. He had been happy to hear about the Gods, the enormous sentient computers who planned out all of human society and who had created him, too. How many people could say that they were part of a God’s special project?

  Unlike many, he had a mother—he was one of the first generation of Vaurian births outside the vat. The nanoscopic circuits in her cells were designed to divide as the cell did, and they bred true. It had been a major success, though he did not know that when he was small. He remembered one day, five years old, looking up at her as she fiddled with a food printer.

  “Mother,” he had said, “what will I be? When I’m big and old like you.”

  She turned and focused on him. There had always been a puzzled effort in his mother’s face, a slowness. He would learn, much later, that it was the puzzlement of a woman who had never had a mother and was working out from books and guesswork how to be one.

  “Anything,” she said. “That’s the point, isn’t it?” Her cheekbones grew wider, and her hair rippled from ash-black to blonde for emphasis. “Anything at all.”

  * * *

  “Darker than that,” said Mr. Haieray behind Mimoru in the dirty mirror. “Zora are soothed by light-dark contrast. What do you think I hired a Vaurian for? Skin dark, like space. Palms, teeth, hair and eyes white. Like stars. And body round. Why can’t you be female for this one? Women are rounder. We have to make this deal.”

  Mimoru struggled to comply, watching his—her, now—form balloon out under her loose robes. On Vaur, where everyone could do it, changing form had not been a private thing. Here, Mr. Haieray’s gaze felt rude. Like peeking under Mimoru’s clothes.

  Everything felt dirty here, out on the edge of the galaxy. Everything was always dirty in comparison with Vaur. Everything built by humans: crooked, low-tech. But it had been Mimoru’s choice to come out here.

  She studied herself in the mirror. In school, Mimoru had studied humans of many nationalities—not only bodies, but mannerisms, tics of expression, styles of dress. She had seen very dark-skinned humans from Old Earth, a deeper tone than the medium brown of most other worlds. But what Mr. Haieray was asking went beyond that. It was a caricature.

  She’d signed on as an accountant, not a shapeshifter-on-command. But any Vaurian was a shapeshifter-on-command when you got down to it. Refuse Mr. Haieray in one of these small things, and the short list of employers available to Mimoru would grow much shorter. She’d been foolish to think it would be different.

  “More,” said Mr. Haieray.

  And Mimoru was getting paid for this. She ballooned out, further and further, until he was satisfied.

  * * *

  Vaurian school was taught by robots and angels: the latter were mortals who had agreed to do the Gods’ bidding. Some angels were Vaurian but most weren’t. Most of Mimoru’s teachers had been stuck in only one body with thick titanium plates glinting at their temples where all of the circuitry connecting them to the Gods went. You always had to do what an angel said because they were the Gods’ servants, and they did much more than teach: terraformed worlds, organized societies, hunted down heretics. That last one most of all.

  When Mimoru was eight, the angels had started to frown at him for reasons he did not understand and to schedule more than the usual number of private talks with his mother.

  Mimoru could guess what they were talking about. There was something wrong with him. The other Vaurians, by the age of eight, had established an elaborate social structure. Cliques formed and were infiltrated, betrayed, broken, and reformed; the smallest details of mannerism became shibboleths by which one group recognized another. Everyone wanted to fool everyone else, to be the best spy. That was what Vaurians were for, after all: to be a special kind of angel when they grew up. Angels who could look like anyone.

  Mimoru, at eight, did not like cliques. He had been taught a great deal about emotions and social structures, so he understood what they were, but keeping up with them in practice was too much. Sometimes, even the noise of his classmates playing was too much. Mimoru liked quiet. He liked to read, count, and sort things. He liked to sit alone in the library.

  “It is not unexpected,” said the assessment robot to Mimoru’s mother when it called her in. The assessment room’s walls were crystalline on three sides. They sparkled down on Mimoru as he hunched in his chair, understanding only that he had failed. “We can’t micromanage the genes of biologically born children. It was inevitable that defects would arise.”

  Mimoru wondered what it meant for a person to be a defect. Or what he would do, if he could not be an angel, after all.

  * * *

  Hex Station, where Mr. Haieray had taken Mimoru for this latest job, was nothing like Vaur. It was large, lumpy, misshapen. It had been built piecemeal over hundreds of years, a collaboration between several alien races—mostly Spiders and Aikita. The effect was a hodgepodge: carpets and hangings in the styles of dozens of worlds thrown over simple steel and ceramic bulkheads, a disorienting warren of tunnels, steps, and elevators, opening out every so often into a breathtakingly wide arboretum. Doors and corridors were wide, to accommodate alien bulk, but most rooms were no larger than they needed to be. The work space that the Stardust Interplanetary Trading Company had rented was particularly small—a meeting chamber, a shabby anteroom, a couple of offices, and a storage room that doubled as headquarters for the company medic. Hex Station had proper hospitals, of course, but most of their doctors had not studied human anatomy, so it paid to bring someone along.

  They didn’t need the space for long. Just long enough to make one deal. But Mr. Haieray wasn’t very happy about that deal, judging from the way he paced back and forth. “The Zora should have been here by now.”

  “I warned you,” said Bûr-Nïb, the secretary, examining her long green nails. “Zora get strange every few cycles.”

  Bûr-Nïb was one of Stardust Interplanetary Trading Company’s non-humans. Fully ten percent of their number was alien, which was enormous by human standards—in the core of human space, one might live a full and adventurous life and never see one. Aliens gave Stardust an edge in making deals with other aliens, or so Mr. Haieray said. In practice, most aliens at Stardust worked shit jobs like Mimoru’s.

  Bûr-Nïb’s body plan was more or less humanoid: upright bipedal and just over five feet tall with an outslung face only slightly off human proportions. She rarely spoke of Íntlànsûr, her homeworld; rumor had it that she’d been driven out. She was one of the few here Mimoru would consider a friend.

  “They agreed to meet fifteen minutes ago.”

  “I’m aware of the time, sir.”

  “I proposed the time and they agreed.”

  Bûr-Nïb wrested her gaze from her nails and looked Mr. Haieray directly in the face—a sign of aggression, for Íntlànsûrans, though her accented voice remained level. “Yes, and a year ago, that agreement would mean something. Six months from now, it will mean something. But with Zor
and its neighboring stars in this alignment—”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Mr. Haieray snapped.

  “They will be here,” said Bûr-Nïb. “Eventually. They just won’t concede that time works the way you say it does.”

  Mimoru shot Bûr-Nïb a sympathetic glance, which she politely—by Íntlànsûran standards—ignored. Calendars and years had always been of interest to Mimoru. The way that stars and planets moved, always changing but in a controllable, predictable way.

  “What alignment would that be?” she asked as Mr. Haieray stalked away.

  Bûr-Nïb waved a hand. “It has to do with Zor, Antares, Ovus-55B, and a few others. Um, but it’s probably one of these things that’s not polite for humans to discuss. It involves, um . . . religious rituals.”

  “Oh,” said Mimoru.

  She cared less than Bûr-Nïb seemed to think. Obviously, aliens were heathens; most of them had never even heard of a human God. Those who did, like Bûr-Nïb, seemed to prefer not to discuss it. Most humans did not like to discuss the Gods with aliens, either. If a human began to believe whatever an alien believed—to worship nature, or philosophy, or imaginary spiritual beings, instead of the Gods—they’d be a heretic. They’d need to be killed. But aliens were not subject to the Gods, so they had to make do with something else. Mimoru wasn’t scandalized by that thought the way so many people were; it was just life for aliens.

  “Humans,” Bûr-Nïb muttered, watching Mr. Haieray pace.

  * * *

  Mimoru, despite his defects, was not prohibited from becoming an angel. Nor were any of his classmates forced. They didn’t need to be: signing the contract and shipping out to have the neural circuitry installed, when one came of age, was simply the thing to do. A few rebels, singly or in small cliques, chose otherwise. They went down to the mortal world to spy and steal for the highest bidder. Or sometimes to act.

  Mimoru did none of these things. In spite of his eighteen years on Vaur, he was a bad liar who frightened easily, hated attention, and did not think well on his feet. He was not good for much except reading and counting, and angels did not need any help with those things. So he found his way to a mortal college, worked his way through by waiting tables, and ended up with a degree in accounting.