[anthology] Darrell Schweitzer (ed) - Cthulhu's Reign

by Unknown

  Navigator was occupied with directing the flyers, maneuvering them within the Terran atmosphere in accordance with the directionals of the Remnants’ telepath.

  All this went on for long and long.

  “The signals are stronger now,” Seeker said. Her voice was a musical whisper that floated above the steady mechanical humming of the control room. “I have a closely approximate placement. They are in a wilderness terrain. The locator flyers send pictures of the area. Can Navigator direct a beacon landing near?”

  He considered for a time. “Yes,” he said and described briefly the landscape at large, with particular emphasis upon a river in its midst and a high bluff that hung above its lower stretches. “But we must be secret and exquisite of touch. The plateau there is close upon a place where the Old Ones are laboring. I cannot make out exactly what they are constructing, but their presence will be strong there and the beacon cannot be placed any farther downstream. Even so, that plateau is the best choice.”

  “Have the flyers recorded pictures Seeker can send?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Seeker?” I asked.

  “Have forbearance,” she said. “Contact is complex.”

  “The Old Ones are close upon them,” I said. “There is a concern of time.”

  “Have forbearance.”

  Then in another while she said she was contacting and the rest of us could not help directing much attention, though we did not neglect our urgent duties. How could we not watch our most precious sister when she must undergo the rigors of contact with an alien species? The mind- frames of otherworlders are so different from ours that sometimes they can tatter the rationality of both telepathic parties. The Great Ones had described Terrans as being much like ourselves, but complete likeness was not possible and the margin of unlikeness, the forceful tension of sheer otherness, would cause a fearful strain on the mind-spirit of Seeker and perhaps a worse consequence. She once said it was like plunging down and down into a boiling sea within which unknown creatures drifted and darted, their shapes and sizes ungraspable until after long acquaintance. If the Terran telepath was indeed deranged, there was a possibility that her condition would infect Seeker’s mind.

  I believed I could not do the thing my sister was doing, even if I possessed her abilities. One must be strong of selfhood and sometimes that is insufficient. According to Alliance records, a number of telepaths have been contacted by Starhead minds. Those pale individuals lived out the rest of their days in the state that the English call catatonia, though the term falls short. In catatonia the mind is inoperable, but with Old-Ones’ telepathic damage, the mind no longer exists. Some other indescribable mode of unconsciousness supplants it.

  “I am receiving more strongly,” Seeker said. “Is it nighttime where the signal emits? I think she may be sleeping. Some send stronger when they sleep, in particular if they are un-normal. Sleeping, they are less distracted.”

  “It is nighttime at the emission point,” Navigator said.

  “What does she signal?” I asked.

  “She sends large smells of an animal friendly to her. It is not a slave organism, as we feared. It is a parasite or symbiote in complex and close relationship. I do not comprehend. Her name for it is a queenie. I think that must mean companion or helpmeet.”

  “May it be telepathic, this animal? Is it of normal mind?”

  Seeker said nothing for long and then made a hand gesture of disappointment. “I cannot know,” she said.

  “But the autist is calmly receptive while sleeping. As soon as we find a beacon place, I can tell her where.”

  “This Remnant group is safe from the Old Ones for the moment?”

  Now she became more and more intent, enmeshed with Ship so closely in the mind-contact it was as if she were wearing the network of amplifiers and transceivers as a robe wrapped around her thinking. “Somewhere there is something perilous,” she said. Her expression was darkening. “I cannot say what as of yet.”

  “Perhaps—” I began to say.

  “Seeker, withdraw!” Doctor said.

  Her face grew even more white and her eyelids fluttered. She thrashed her hands against her upper arms.

  “Seeker, withdraw now!” Doctor said.

  Her voice was high and thin and shrill when she said the words the autist on Terra must have been hearing. “Tekeli-li.”

  “Seeker!” cried Doctor and cried we all as well.

  III

  Vern was fairly pleased with the progress they had made today. His rough estimate was that he had brought Moms and Echo about a kilometer and a half along the streamside before evening came into the woods and visibility was hindered and the first faint pipings—Tekeli-li— were heard from the west. Now it was time to find shelter, the best hiding place they could discover.

  They were following the stream as it ran south down the mountainside. The decline was steep enough that it kept a fairly straight course, though it curled around the bases of some of the prominent hills and widened out in some of the more level hollers. He had reasoned that if the picture Echo had guided him to draw were indeed a ravine with a stream at the bottom, that water would almost necessarily be the same under which their cave was located and, if that were the case, it would be to the south where the force of its falling would have carved deeply between the hills.

  That was a big if and Vern trusted his reasoning less than Moms did. She had more faith in him than he had in himself. Or perhaps she only pretended to, bolstering his confidence.

  In any case, they must find a place to eat and sleep and to try to hide. Tonight was not as cold as last night and they would be warmer if they went into the woods a little way from the cold stream. He wanted to get some distance from the sound of it too, so that they might better hear anything moving through the forest.

  That thin shrilling, the nerve-wracking piping of the shoggoths, had not come closer and Vern estimated that the group of them must be at least two kilometers away. The dreadful sound carried far, especially at night in these otherwise silent mountains. But the sound was close enough to cause Echo fearful distress.

  He did not know if she had ever seen one of the creatures. Probably she had not, for the sound of their shrilling would recall their image and that would send her into paroxysms. He had seen them only once, two of them, as they fell upon a deer and did not devour so much as absorb it. Shapeless or nearly shapeless they were, composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and these would be about fifteen feet in diameter when spherical. Yet they had a constantly shifting shape and volume, throwing out temporary developments—arms, pseudopods, tentacles—and forming, deforming and reforming organs of sight and speech. Tekeli-li was the word, as nearly as Vern could approximate the sound with human phonemes, that they spoke to one another almost continuously, though the slight variations in pitch and timbre he was able to perceive suggested that this one utterance was capable of a plenitude of meanings. That word had been recorded by the old historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  He had been stalking the same deer himself, a young doe that had not learned caution, and had been so horrified when the monsters burst out of the foliage upon their prey, that he swooned away for a few moments. That was a piece of good luck. If he had cried out, they would have made an end of him.

  They would have ended the lives of Moms and Echo too—and of Queenie, for there was an intense detestation of those creatures for dogs and of dogs for them. Shoggoths, as the humans supposed, communicated telepathically with the Old Ones their masters, and the presence of Vern in that glade where the doe was ingested, or rather, digested, would have been made known. Then the Old Ones would come to search this part of the forest and they would unfailingly find Echo, though they might not comprehend the origin of her kind of mind-pictures.

  Echo had tired of walking and clambering over the rocks and Vern and Moms had taken turns carrying her for the past hour or so. She was in Moms’ arms now
and, as the four of them came to the edge of a large streamside boulder, Vern signaled for Moms and Echo to stay behind, while he searched for a suitable place to last out the night.

  They had arrived at a fairly level place on the mountainside. The stream widened out here and was less voluble over its stones. If he could find a spot forty or so yards from its edge, they ought to be able to hear forest sounds clearly and to distinguish those that signaled danger. A cave would be ideal, but this place could offer nothing like that.

  There was a dense laurel thicket bordering a ferny glade, and when he skirted it, he found a small opening. Echo would be frightened to crawl into this little tunnel in the foliage, but she would not be terror-stricken. He explored it for about fifteen yards and then could go no farther, the tightly meshed branches and twigs forming a prickly wall. Cozy, Vern thought. He realized that it had sheltered an animal not long ago, perhaps a fawn or maybe one of the black bears common in these hills. It would be a good place. Maybe they could even chance a tiny fire.

  But when he brought the family inside this den, he decided against the fire. The smoke might not easily be visible at night, but they would have to crowd closely to the flame and Echo would be so transfixed by the sight of it that she might not be able to communicate. Flashing water, trembling fronds, twinkling lights—these sent her into a trancelike state, so fixedly that she could concentrate on nothing else.

  So Vern and Moms tried their best to approximate the evening routine they had clung to when they lived in the cave. He crawled out of the brambly little tunnel to “scout,” while Moms primped Echo and combed her hair. Then Vern returned with a tin flask of water and Moms opened the canvas bag with the decal that read University Bookstore and brought out jerky for Vern and herself and smoked fish for Echo. Sometimes Echo’s teeth were painful and she would refuse to chew the dried deer meat.

  After this meal, Vern and Moms arranged leaf piles for bedding. The fallen laurel leaves were thick here but made unsatisfactory mattresses, cold and slick and noisy. Uneasy sleep was guaranteed.

  Now Moms took Echo in her arms and held her closely. This was their quiet time and Vern wanted to use it to question Echo, but he could not think how to ask what they needed to know.

  “What voices do you hear inside?”

  She shook her head, not meeting his eyes, and Vern looked to Moms for aid.

  Moms said, “I know that we need to know what to look for, the source of the call or summons to her, but I don’t know how to ask, either.”

  “If it is a person or a group of people, we must see them before they see us,” Vern said. “If we don’t like the look of them, we won’t make ourselves known.”

  “But if we approach closely, they will sense we are there. It may be that they already know we are traveling toward their signal.”

  “Shiny,” Echo murmured. Then she turned the word into a little song. “Shiny, shy-nee, shiny, shy- nee.” She was carefully not looking at Vern or Moms.

  “Shiny?” Vern asked. “What is shiny, Echo?”

  For a long time she only repeated the word, but at last added another. “Wall. Shiny, shy-nee wall. Shine wall.”

  “Go there?” Vern asked. “Are we to go to a shiny wall?”

  She nodded and looked at him and smiled. The picture in her mind of this shiny wall made her happy.

  “Is it a too-bright?” Moms asked. “Does it hurt Echo’s eyes?”

  Slowly she wagged her head no. “Wall of shy-nee,” she said.

  “It must be a place,” Vern said. “Maybe a building.”

  “Yes,” Moms said. “A structure of some kind. Are there any buildings positioned by a ravine that would not be built by the Old Ones?”

  “I don’t know,” Vern said. “I had thought that all the human things in this area had been destroyed. Maybe it is not a building but a machine. If it looks like a wall to Echo, it could be a big machine.”

  “Only the Old Ones have large machines now.”

  “They would not be sending a call to Echo. If they knew where she was, we would already be killed.”

  “Let us suppose that it is some sort of machine made by someone other than the Old Ones. If they wanted us to come to their machine, why didn’t they place it or send it close to where we were?”

  “I don’t know,” Vern said. Then in a moment: “Maybe because if things don’t work out, if something goes wrong, we could still get back to our cave and be safe there, since the Olders don’t know about it. If this shiny wall was discovered by them, they would search close by and find our cave.”

  “Perhaps,” Moms said. “Anyway, we have decided that we should answer the summons. Does the singing of the shoggoths seem to be getting closer to us? It may be that we need to find this shiny wall soon.”

  “As soon as we can,” Vern said. “Let us try to get some rest.”

  He had not said “sleep” and he suspected that Moms’s night was as unrestful as his own. Tekeli-li had sounded continuously and the shrillness came from different quarters. It seemed to be advancing upon them, but perhaps that was an illusion brought on by anxiety. Queenie did not behave as if shoggoths were closing in and Vern trusted her senses.

  The morning routine matched that of the evening, except that Vern actually did scout, trying to make sure the area was free of traces of the Olders and to acquire an idea of the topography they were to travel through. He found a tall poplar with one branch low enough to give access to the upper branches and climbed easily. The months of outdoor survival had given him a wiry, purposeful musculature and a sureness of foot, hand, and eye. He was not even breathing heavily when he made it to the nearly leafless top and stood on a sturdy limb.

  From here he could see the stream as it wound out of the holler, disappeared around a bend, and reappeared below, all whitewater and jumbled rock. Above the stream at that point reared a cliff, its level top a treeless, grassy sward. He decided it would be more informative to leave the streamside and climb along the ridges to that cliff. Even if it did not border the ravine shown in Echo’s map, it would offer a prospect of the southern reaches, so that if they did return to streamside, he would have some notion of where they were located in the forest.

  Following the ridges would be no easy task, he thought, and indeed it was not. Echo found the trail-less climb hard going; she wanted to stop often and fix her attention on ragged leaves waving in the breeze upon ragged oak limbs. Then Moms would carry her for a while, shifting her from one arm to the other. And then Vern would carry, giving to Moms the book bag containing their provisions.

  Still, they went forward, halting often to rest but then pushing on. Echo was not easy to manage, with so many new sights tugging at her faculties, but Vern and Moms got accustomed to her rhythms and Queenie showed canny trail-sense, finding openings and pathways that Vern would have overlooked.

  A little after midday they came to a clearing full of goldenrod and orchard grass and Joe Pye weed and there, unexpectedly close, loomed the cliff face. There was a ridge leading close to the top on the western side; Vern thought that if they followed it at the rate of speed they had been making, they would gain the plateau before nightfall.

  They did make pretty good time, but Vern had been deceived by the land-folds. The ridgeline led not to the cliff plateau but wandered off farther westward and there was no way to attain the top except by scrambling down to the very bottom and climbing the perilous-looking path that zigzagged up the face. Echo would not like those heights; the cliff looked to be about 250 feet high. She might struggle violently against being taken up, but their choices were nonexistent.

  The climb was, however, steeper and more toilsome than he had counted on and, though Echo did not writhe and struggle, she refused to walk and proved a heavy burden. The day began to darken toward a chilly twilight and they had gotten only about halfway up. When they halted for a rest, Vern debated with himself whether to continue climbing or to go back down and find a night place.

  Then when th
e ancient trail doubled back upward, there opened a hole in the cliff-wall, a cave that had not been visible from below because a projecting ledge hid it from the sightline. He motioned for Moms and Echo to stay in the trail and he and Queenie went toward the opening. Queenie sniffed all around the cave mouth, but she did not seem disturbed and Vern let her enter before him. The natural thing to fear in this spot was a rattlesnake den. Some of the caves in these mountains were filled with hundreds of serpents, coiled side by side among rocks and stretched out upon ledges. But Queenie went in without barking. She came out in a few minutes and gave Vern a quizzical gaze and he followed as she reentered.

  This cave was handmade, like the path that had been carved into the cliff face. The Cherokee must have maintained this place to evade the soldiers that herded their nation so murderously westward. There were many hiding places like this, cellar- like holes dug out in the woods, large cubbyholes chopped into thorny blackberry thickets. In one of the latter Vern had found a flint hatchet. Other sites yielded shards of pots.

  In here, though, he found no trace of the Cherokee and the one utensil was a pewter pitcher which lay in the deep dust. Disposed around it in disorder were eight skeletons. Three of these were of children and the others, to judge by size and structure, belonged to adults of varying ages. Clothing had rotted away, but remains of shoes and boots clung to the pedal bones of the adults. Two skeletons lay with some of the upper-body bones entangled, as if that couple had died in an embrace.

  It was likely that they had died so. Vern imagined that here had come a family or an enclave of refugees from one of the scattered settlements; they would have been of like faith and resolve. They had killed themselves, Vern thought, and before him in the dust lay the pewter pitcher in which they has passed round the poison. This group of intimates had found it nobler and easier to die by their own hands than to be done in coolly, methodically, and agonizingly by the Old Ones—or in disgusting, viscous horror as victims of the shoggoths.