by Unknown
Please, he prayed—although he was an atheist—don’t let it be me. Because he was a biologist, though, he took note of the fruit-bats’ eyes. The bats were obviously not nocturnal in their habits, so their eyes were adapted for day vision; these specimens were not as blind as bats even in their natural state—but that didn’t explain why the unnaturally huge creatures had eyes that looked almost human in their fox-like heads.
After a few seconds, during which he saw one creature’s needle-sharp teeth tear into the face of an Oriental man—who did not scream—Tremeloe was on the point of withdrawing the almost . . . but he never quite got there, because one of the bats suddenly descended upon him, as if out of nowhere.
He felt the monster’s breath on his cheek, caught its rancid stink in his nostrils, and looked into its not-quite-almost-human eyes, and knew that it was about to pluck out his own as it groped with its clawed feet . . . but then it was suddenly gone again, snatched away as abruptly as it had arrived.
After the bats had come the huge birds . . . and they really were huge. They were eagles, or condors, or something akin to both but not quite either. At any rate, they were raptors, and they numbered human- fruit-bats among their prey of choice. There weren’t as many birds as bats, so some of the bats were enabled to start their hasty meals in peace, but the birds were even fiercer, and they could easily carry a bat in each claw, so it wasn’t long before the bats fluttered away, seeking the cover of the sprawling crowns.
The raptors too, Tremeloe realized, as he watched his own avian savior fall into the sky, clutching for its next meal with its terrible talons, had unnaturally large eyes: not eyes like a hawk’s, but eyes like a man’s . . . .
Tremeloe looked his white-faced neighbor in the eyes and said: “Is this hell?” He knew that it was a stupid question. He’d done much better before, when his not-quite-immediate response to the possibility that he had been reincarnated had been: how? By whom?
What the other said in reply, however, was: “That depends.”
A phrase that the mysterious other had used while they were still enclosed by merciful darkness floated back into Tremeloe’s mind: the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Except, the other had added, presumably knowing already that he was simply a head- fruit, there wasn’t much freedom in their present existential state. Nor ecstasy either, so far as I can tell, Tremeloe added, privately. Although it might have been more exciting, now that he thought about it, to be reincarnated as a human eagle . . . better, at any rate, than being reincarnated as a human fruit-bat.
Are we all vampires now?
But the real questions were still how and by whom?
“I’m not who I think I am, am I?” Tremeloe said to the other, who seemed to know a lot more than he did.
“I’m just some sort of replica, created from some sort of recording. This isn’t the twenty- first century, is it? This is a much later era—maybe the end of time. Is this the Omega Point? Is this the Omega Point Intelligence’s idea of a joke?”
“I wish it were,” the other replied. “Perhaps it is . . . but my suspicion is that it’s not as late as you think. The Coleopteran Era is a long way off as yet, alas. This is Cthulhu’s Reign . . . what the human race were designed to be and to become. But no, we’re not just replicas reproduced from some sort of recording; we’re actually who we think we are, shifted forwards in time. You are, at any rate. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t belong here. I only borrowed a human body temporarily, and then I returned to Pnakotus. I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t right.”
Tremeloe thought that he had just as much right to protest as the other, but his mind—which was not only refusing to dissolve into incoherent idiocy but perversely insistent on retaining an emotional state more reminiscent of complacency than abject terror—was oddly intent on trying to pick up the thread of the narrative that the other fruit-head was stubbornly not spelling out.
“Pnakotus,” he said. “That’s the mythical city in the Australian desert, where some of the so-called forbidden manuscripts were found. You really believe that’s where you’re from?” He paused momentarily before adding the key question: “When, exactly?”
“Two hundred million years before you were born,” the other replied. “But I seem to have been removed from the twenty-first century, where I spent ten years doing research. That memory was supposed to have been erased—not just blocked off, like some fraction of a computer hard disk whose supposed deletion is merely a matter of losing its address, but actually wiped clean . . . reformatted. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to live in Pnakotus for another hundred million years or more, and then migrate to the Coleopteran Era, in order to avoid all this. The Great Race of Yith are inhabitants of eternity. Chulthu and the star-spawn simply aren’t relevant to us . . . .”
There was a rustling on the bough from which Tremeloe’s head was hanging down, and he saw something moving behind the head that was talking to him. He couldn’t see its body, so it might have been a lizard, or a snake, or neither . . . but he could see its head, and its suddenly-gaping mouth, and its forked tongue, and its oh-so-human eyes . . . .
However its body was formed, it had to be big: bigger than an anaconda. For a moment, Tremeloe thought that he was about to lose the only entity in this bizarre world that was capable of holding a conversation with him—that the un-man from Pnakotus was about to be swallowed whole by the monster—but then the leaves moved. The leaves were clever, it seemed, and surprisingly strong, given their apparent delicacy. They flipped the stealthy predator into the air, and it fell, crashing through the branches, seemingly moving up and up but actually tumbling down and down . . . until it hit the boggy surface with a glutinous semi-splash.
It was invisible by then, but when Tremeloe looked at the green streaks that were visible between the crowns of his trees and its neighbors, he saw multiple movements, as if creatures akin to crocodiles were homing in on the splash, in anticipation of a feast. He could not see the crocodiles’ eyes and more than he could distinguish their bodies, but he did not doubt that they would be human.
As hells go, he thought, it’s not so bad to be a human-head-fruit, given that we have such defenders to prevent our being stolen and eaten. As a biologist, however, he knew full well that the whole purpose of a fruit is to be eaten, and thus deduced that if he really were being defended, the purpose of that defense might only be to preserve him for the preferred fructicarnivore . . . except, of course, that he was not a seed-bearing entity at all, but a mind-bearing entity, which might or might not change the logic of the situation completely.
He suddenly remembered a line that everyone at Miskatonic knew, supposedly quoted—in translation, of course—from the mysterious Necronomicon: “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu lies sleeping.” There was a fragment of verse, too, which ended “that is not dead which can eternal lie,” but the relevant point seemed to be, if the un-man from Pnakotus could be taken seriously—which was surely necessary in a world where madness no longer seemed to be possible—that dead Cthulhu was no longer asleep, but awake, and that his awakening had changed the world out of all recognition, maybe not overnight, but rapidly . . . and purposefully.
“What did you mean,” Tremeloe said to his companion, “this is what the human race was designed to be and to become?”
“Just that,” the other replied. “That was why Cthulhu and the star-spawn came to Earth: to produce and shape humankind. The raw material was rather unpromising when they first arrived, and seemed to be headed for insect domination, but they’re patient by nature, and we saw immediately what the results of their project would be, at least in the shorter term. They didn’t bother us—just worked alongside us for tens of millions of years. Ours was a parallel project, after all. They create, we record—we’re complementary species. They seemed to be leaving us alone, just as we left them alone . . . although I always had my suspicions about the flying polyps. Maybe this is what they always intended, for all of us . . . except
that we already know that we escaped to the belated Coleopteran Era after the Polyp Armageddon. We were only ever present in spirit in the Human Era. We never interfered, except to observe and record—for our own purposes, of course. Nothing was supposed to leak out. Maybe that’s why Cthulhu took against us, although I can’t imagine how the garbled rubbish that found its way from our records into Al Azif and its various supposed translations could have interfered with the star-spawn’s plans for shaping human intelligence.”
Tremeloe had only the vaguest notion of who—or what—Cthulhu and the star-spawn were supposed to be, even though everyone at Miskatonic knew the basics of what was, in effect, the university’s own native folklore. “As I remember it,” he said to his companion, “this Cthulhu character was supposed to be a sort of giant invisible octopus, which came to Earth from another star, and whose eventual resurrection after a long dormancy on the ocean bed was supposed to bring about the end of the world as we knew it. You’re saying that he’s real, and it’s actually happened?”
“It’s difficult to describe Cthulhu in terms of shape and substance,” the other replied, with a calmness that now seemed rather ominous. “He’s primarily a dark matter entity. You know that ninety per cent of the universe’s mass is non-baryonic, right? That it interacts with your sort of matter gravitationally, but not electromagnetically? Well, Cthulhu, the star-spawn, and most of the other life-forms in the universe are essentially dark matter beings, although they can transform themselves wholly or partly into baryonic matter when conditions are right and the whim takes them. Don’t ask me what counts as right or wrong in that context—we Yithians can move our minds in space and time via hyperbaryonic pathways, but we’re not creative. Exactly what the relationship is between Cthulhu’s kind, matter and mind, we don’t know—but they’re certainly interested in them, simply because they are creative. Why they create, and how they select their creative ends, I literally can’t imagine, but the simple fact is that Cthulhu spent hundreds of millions of years shaping the ancestors of human beings, partly in order to produce the kind of intelligence that my kind can borrow—but that was only a means, not an end.”
“And this is the end?”
“Possibly. It’s just as likely to be another phase in the grand plan, requiring something more than evolution by selection. The various cultists who decided, on the basis of leaked Pnakotic lore, that Cthulhu and his hyperbaryonic kindred are gods, looked forward to his return as a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom—a time when humankind would be freed from its self-imposed moral shackles and taught new ways to revel in violence and slaughter—but that was mostly wishful thinking.”
Tremeloe thought about fruit with human brains, and eagles and crocodiles with human eyes, and extrapolated that imagery to the notion of an entire ecosphere in which human intelligence had been redistributed on a profligate scale, in order that human mentality might experience all of nature red in tooth and claw in all its horror and glory . . . and the notion of a “holocaust of ecstasy and freedom” no longer seemed so alien. As an individual, he was certainly not free, nor had he tasted anything akin to ecstasy as yet, but if one tried to see the situation from without, as a single vast pattern . . . .
“Are humans like the one I used to be extinct now?” he asked. “Has the harvest of minds taken place, so that all individual personalities could be relocated?”
“Probably not,” replied the un- man who should not, in his own estimation, ever have been reduced to a mere fruit. “So far as our explorers could tell, original-model humans, living in societies of various sorts, lasted long into the intellectual diaspora . . . although they soon became as opaque to our technology of possession as entities like this. We only have a vague idea of the interim between the era a few millennia down the line from the time that you and I recall and the advent of the Coleopteran Migration.”
There really might be things, Tremeloe thought, harking back to the Necronomicon again, that man was not meant to know. Would I be better off on a tree where I had no language in common with any of my fellow fruit? Would I be better off trying to account for the situation by the force of my own unaided intellect, rather than listening to this bizarre lunacy? Except that it can’t be mere lunacy, unless there are spoiled fruit here as well as healthy ones, whose sanity is being eaten away from within by mindworms . . . .
He quite liked the idea of mindworms, although he knew that it ought to have frightened him. His “liking” was purely aesthetic, so far as he could tell. He thought that he was capable of feeling pleasure, just as he was probably capable of feeling panic, but his new hormonal orchestra was obviously in a quiet mood at present, tranquilizing his brain chemistry more efficiently than the intrinsically horrific thoughts he was formulating therein were disturbing it. If that remained the case, then his situation would surely be better than bearable and more akin to a heaven than a hell.
It would probably be painful if any bat ever got to bite into him or any snake were to swallow him whole, but while he remained safe, successfully protected by the leaves that surrounded him—whose photosynthesis was presumable producing the blood that nourished his flesh and thoughts alike—and the eagles who fed upon the bats, he was feeling no physical pain and no particular mental anguish. If his fate was to suffer eternal inertia, with no idle hands for with the Devil might make work, he thought that he might be able to cope—and since it was now proven that he could be reincarnated, perhaps he had an infinite and infinitely various future to look forward to, in which he would have abundant opportunity to fly and to swim, to squirm and to walk, always knowing that even if pain and death were to arrive, however hideous they might be on a temporary basis, there would be other lives to come: times to rest and times to ponder, times to eat as well as to be eaten . . . .
Or was it, he wondered, merely his reduced capacity to feel such emotions as horror and terror that made the future seem so promising? Might he, in fact, be better off as a gibbering wreck, consumed from within by mindworms, his very consciousness reduced to immaterial dust?
The invisible sun was climbing behind the cloud-sheet. Eventually, it began to rain. The drops seemed tropically large, but when they splashed on his chin and his cheeks the liquid explosions were more pleasurable than painful, and the moisture was welcome. The shower didn’t last long. When it stopped the cloud was much lighter and thinner. Rapid shadows occasionally fluttered across Tremeloe’s face, but no bats or birds came close to him. The eagles patrolling the sky were drifting lazily in slow circles.
“I know that you never expected to be here,” Tremeloe said to his companion, “and that you’d rather be snug and warm in Pnakotus, dreaming of one day becoming a beetle, but this really isn’t as bad as all that, is it?”
“I don’t know,” the other replied, “and not knowing is something that my kind aren’t used to. I shouldn’t be here. I’ve borrowed humanity in the past, for research purposes, but I’m not human. I wasn’t designed for this. It’s not my fate. You’re a prisoner of time, so you can’t begin to understand how Yithians think, any more than I can begin to imagine how Cthulhu and the star-spawn might think, but believe me when I say that this is wrong.”
Tremeloe did believe him, after a fashion, but he couldn’t sympathize. If all the silly rumors about Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee were actually true, and the professor’s body really had been taken over by an alien time-traveler for several years way back in the 1900s, then the alien time-travelers in question evidently didn’t observe the principle of informed consent, and could hardly complain if the tables were turned on them. They had poked their noses into human affairs, and had no right to bleat that they were only reporters, not creators, as if that somehow let them off the moral hook . . . except, of course, that the human world had moved beyond good and evil now, into an era when morality no longer had hooks, or claws, or censorious staring eyes.
Tremeloe remembered the bat’s eyes then and the eagle’s. No, they hadn’t been censorious, or even judgm
ental—but he felt sure that they had been more than merely avid. There had been something in them that was more than mere sight or mere appetite, which might well have been “beyond good and evil,” but held an emotion that was by no means entirely free of dread.
I’m just a head-fruit hanging on a tree, Tremeloe thought. The birds and the crocodiles still have animal bodies and animal hormones. Perhaps I have the best of it, in this far-from-the-best of all possible worlds . . . but if the cycle goes on forever, I’ll have it again and again and again, ad infinitum.
Such was the comforting positive nature of that thought that he did not notice that the sky had become even bluer until the murmur of mostly incomprehensible voices altered him to the fact that something was going on.
At first, he thought that the cloud was simply clearing, its remnants evaporated by the hot tropical sun that was ascending towards its zenith—but then he saw the bloated sun drift free of the brilliant white clouds to take possession of the sky, and saw that its flames were redder and angrier than he had ever known them before.
It really is much later than either of us thought, he said to himself, but then doubted the judgment, as he realized that the excessive blueness of the unclouded sky and the excessive redness of the sun were both optical illusions, caused by the fact that the sky was full of creatures ; creatures that were not quite invisible, although they had to be made of something other than the kind of matter with which he was familiar: something so alien as to be almost beyond perception. The big birds were flying far away with rapid wing-beats.
Tremeloe was conscious of gravity now, although it did not seem to be tugging him in the direction of the green earth, but in the direction of the alien sky, whose no-longer-kindly light hid all the multitudinous stars of the incredibly, unimaginably vast universe within its dazzling glory. “What are they?” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
The other heard him. “Star-spawn,” he replied. “If you could see them, the impression of shape they’d give you would be much like Cthulhu’s, on a much smaller scale: vaguely cephalopodan, with a scaly tegument and oddly tiny wings that shouldn’t work but do.”
