Ray’s voice was deep and sloppy and barely human. “I don’t want to be like them. I want to be human.”
“I know.” She watched Dr. Ramirez approach, and she leaned over and kissed Ray as the needle slid into his arm.
Joette Rozanski is a native of Toledo, Ohio, and works as a desktop publisher for a non-profit organization. Her hobbies are photography, birding, and, of course, writing. Her favorite genres are science fiction, fantasy, humor, and horror. She has stories in a couple of Sword and Sorceress anthologies (XIII and XVI) and the anthologies Such a Pretty Face, Mother Goose is Dead, and Strangely Funny.
Church of the Renewed Covenant
Shannon Fay
And down here is where we hold the services.” The woman showing them the church had starchy orange hair and a lined face. Jake recognized her type from churches he had attended as a child and unwilling teenager. She was a true believer, someone who had dedicated themselves to the church and eagerly awaited the end of days, if only for vindication.
Cheryl looked at the stone floor and walls with wide eyes. Dim light came from the fake gas lamps overhead, barely cutting the shadows in the dark underground room.
“Oh my,” she said. “It’s so atmospheric! I can only imagine what a choir must sound like in here.”
“We don’t have a choir,” explained their tour guide. (Margaret? Jake had already forgotten her name). “We follow the old ways here at Renewed Covenant. We come here to worship, not to be entertained.” She smiled grimly, warming to her theme. “If you want rock bands and stand-up comedians and shouting from the pulpit, you can find that in more ‘modern’ churches, but here, we believe a sincere desire to worship is enough.”
“Oh,” Cheryl said, bright eyes dimming.
Jake felt a tug in his heart but, also, a hit of satisfaction. He had been against this whole church-shopping business. Cheryl had been the one who needled him into it, saying how she wanted to bring the kids up in the faith, how it’d be a good way to meet people, how they might make some business connections. But those were just reasons for Jake.
Cheryl’s only reason was that she believed.
It was different for her, Jake thought. It was always different for converts. They came to the faith with a chip on their shoulder, a desire to prove that, even if they came to the party later in life, they believed all the more for it. They had none of the baggage that came from being bombarded with it from birth.
“Of course, we have made some concessions to the modern world.” Margaret spoke as if she had just sipped sour milk. “We try to make our services welcoming for families. You have three small children, yes?”
“That’s right,” Cheryl said, smiling over at Jake.
“We have a few young families in our congregation,” Margaret said. “With them in mind, we turned one of the rooms upstairs into a mother’s room. If your child is getting restless during a service, you can take them up there. There are toys and books, and—”
“You call it the ‘mother’s room’?” Jake said. “Oh, right, because it’s totally the woman’s job to look after the kids.”
Margaret tilted her chin upwards. “Like I said, we follow the old ways here.”
“Sure, ‘cause the husband and wife would never, say, take turns,” Jake went on. “And what if it’s a male gay couple? Would they be allowed to take their kid into the ‘mother’s room’?” He looked at Margaret. “You do accept gay people into the church, don’t you?”
“As far as we are concerned, a person’s sexuality has no relevance if they come with a true desire to worship,” Margaret said. “At the same time, it’s not something we encourage.”
Jake wasn’t surprised. He had figured out when he was thirteen that the church was stuck in the past when it came to issues of sexuality and race. And as for its treatment of women … well, what could you expect from a faith born out of a paranoid New England man’s fear of female genitalia?
Jake wasn’t surprised, but he was perversely pleased. This was an easy out if there ever was one. Jake looked at Cheryl. Look, he tried to say through a waggle of his eyebrows. They’re a bunch of sexist, racist homophobes!
Cheryl just looked back at him, disappointed. He knew that look well: You only care about scoring points.
Jake sighed.
“Excuse me, Margaret,” he said, and the woman frowned. Oh crap, he had got her name wrong. Oh well. “Could I speak with my wife for a moment?”
“Certainly,” ‘Margaret’ said and headed upstairs.
Cheryl went and stood by the stone altar, running her hands along the top.
“Look at this place,” she whispered. “It really feels like the elder gods are sleeping right under our feet.”
Jake stood beside her. “Well, the nice thing about the elder gods is that, no matter where you’re standing, they’re always right below you. You don’t need a church to be close to them.”
Cheryl shook her head. “I don’t get you sometimes, Jake. You crap on every church we visit, yet you believe more deeply than anyone I’ve ever known.”
Jake shrugged. It was a conundrum. For all the scorn, for all the Friday nights he spent at home watching TV rather than wearing a hooded cloak and chanting in Latin, for all his disdain, he could not shake the belief within him that the elder gods slept fitfully below the earth and would one day awaken.
“Look, babe, this isn’t the place for us,” he said. “They still think it’s the 1930s around here. And they don’t even have a choir! Even old Crafty liked organ music.”
Cheryl chuckled. “Yeah, no choir was the breaking point for me. I was just hoping they’d win me back somehow.”
He pulled her into a hug.
“We’ll find a place,” Jake said. “Somewhere we can bask in existential horror while working past all of the problematic crap.”
“Right, we’ll keep looking,” Cheryl replied.
‘Margaret’ was waiting for them upstairs.
“Thank you for showing us around, Mary,” Cheryl said, giving Jake a knowing look at the woman’s name. Jake turned his laugh into a cough. “We’ll keep the Church of the Renewed Covenant in mind.”
“Indeed,” Mary said, her mouth pursed. “Well, I hope to see you at a Friday mass in the near future. Until then, may the elder gods sleep.”
“May the elder gods sleep,” Cheryl repeated.
“May the elder gods sleep,” Jake said, a grin spreading across his face.
Shannon Fay is a Canadian writer currently living in London. She is the 2013 winner of The James White Award (an award for new writers) and a 2014 graduate of Clarion West. She has worked on farms in the UK, in a youth hostel in Amsterdam, and in a bookstore in Canada. (Weirdly, the bookstore was the worst job when it came to cleaning up bodily fluids.) She can be found online at www.ayearonsaturn.com and on Twitter (@shannonlfay).
The Posthumous Recruitment of Timothy Horne
Pete Rawlik
Captain Timothy Horne of the 7th Hypnological Battalion was dead—or near enough to dead that other states of being didn’t apply. That was what the recruitment packet had said. Normally, he would have asked his momma for her opinion of the deal, but he was dead, and she was still back in Belle Glade driving a bus in Palm Beach to make ends meet. If he agreed to participate, she would get a $10,000 signing bonus, disguised as a death benefit. If he passed the entrance exam, the bonus would translate into $3,000 a month for life—her life. What Horne got out of it was a second chance: he committed to ten years of service, and if he wanted to, he could then part company, no questions asked, no debts, with what appeared to be a hefty separation package.
For a black kid from the Glades well past the verge of death, it seemed a more than fair offer. It was better than the one he had taken when he joined up to fight the invaders. Of course, back then, everyone and their brother were joining ranks against the aliens. It was the human thing to do.
The one thing that the entire population of Earth could agree on was that
the aliens had no business on the moon. The United Nations was still formulating a response when the deep space probes went offline. Then the Europa rover went silent.
In the course of three days, every piece of human technology outside the orbit of the moon went down. The ESA used the attitude thrusters on an old communications satellite to push it into a trajectory that crossed the four-hundred-thousand-kilometer line marked by the moon—what would later be called simply the Boundary. The whole world watched as that immense piece of manufacturing and design trudged slowly past an imaginary boundary and was swarmed by half-visible creatures whose insectoid wings seemed to push against a medium we could not detect. They didn’t tear it to pieces, but the result was the same.
A half hour later, the first communication came in. The Migou introduced themselves, and we learned that our world was subject to an interdiction. For some reason, one that was not explained to us, we had been quarantined. Nothing from earth would be let beyond the Boundary. Communications back were not responded to. Suddenly denied access to the final frontier, a frontier that only a few nations could afford to travel in, the world declared war on the Migou.
That war did not go well.
The Migou and their ships, great organic things that resembled the silica-based shells of microscopic algae, were not invulnerable, but it took a concentrated effort to bring them down. Afterward, they didn’t last long. Whatever made them only half-visible also destabilized their very existence. It took hours, sometimes days, but in the end, the Migou and their vehicles dissolved into a plastic soup that burned the skin. The chemists and material engineers couldn’t explain it, but the theoretical physicists could. Based on their studies of the alien bodies and artifacts, they had some startling news for the human race. The universe, our universe, wasn’t particularly hospitable to life as we knew it.
Humans tend to think of the universe as having four dimensions: three spatial dimensions and time. The reality was that the universe was comprised of twenty-three dimensions, nineteen of which humans couldn’t perceive, let alone take advantage of. The Migou could perceive some of those dimensions and were likely comprised not only of matter as we knew it but also of extradimensional equivalents. To our limited senses, that was why they were only partially visible and why they fell apart so quickly.
They moved and lived not only in the spaces we knew of but in those in between as well. If humans were going to fight and win a war with the Migou, the weapons employed would have to be radically different. The Gilman equations said this was possible, but every blade, every gun, and every ship that incorporated the exotic extradimensional technology functioned only briefly before tearing itself and the user apart. Something about the human brain was anathema to the new tech, and the exotic machines responded in a spectacularly violent way.
Horne had a vague memory that using alien tech was what led to his own death. He could remember the feel of something bizarre in his hands, something that fired bolts of blue, spiraling energy. The backwash had left waves of white scars across his coffee-colored arms. Even in death, those scars ached, reminding him of what had happened. He had wondered how it was that in death he could still feel pain. Was it a physical memory, or were those scars merely psychic, mere memories of the pain that had been inflicted? Then he had remembered his mother and her bus, and he stopped thinking about his own well-being and signed the papers.
That was three days ago.
It felt like they had been marching down the stairs ever since.
“Man, I thought the Nine Hundred Steps to Deeper Slumber was a metaphor.” Horne mumbled to no one in particular.
Major Carter didn’t break his pace but just kept up the steady downward march. “It is, Horne, that’s why the number of steps varies from culture to culture. It’s a test—a kind of endurance test. Making the transition from our world to the Dreamlands can’t be easy, at least not at first. You have to want it, to work for it, to build a new set of bridges. What the psychophysicists call neural conduits. The steps are just a manifestation of that, mostly because that’s what we’ve told you about during orientation. In other settings, its other things: at the airbase in Wichita, they use a yellow brick road; in Britain, the imagery is of a wardrobe and a forest of coats. They’re just symbols, obstacles to overcome in order to reach the Dream Lands.”
Horne looked back at his companions in this weird effort.
An entire battalion had begun marching down those stairs: twelve hundred men. Now he could barely see twenty. The rest were lost in the fog and darkness that seemed to seep out of the very air. There were no walls on the Steps to Deeper Slumber, no rails, no bannisters, no braces, or any other kind of architecture. There were just steps, endless runners and risers that just seemed to spiral downward into the mist. There were no lights either, and yet, still he could see—not far but far enough. The mist and the darkness beyond were ominous. If he looked too long, he could see things moving. He could hear things as well: the beating of great wings, screeching calls of titanic birds, whispering voices that said things he couldn’t quite understand. Some of those voices sounded like his grandmother, others like his father. They called to him, implored him, and tried to draw him away from his downward progress. He wanted to go, but something in the back of his mind kept forcing him to keep marching.
“Is it true that the Dream Lands are … you know … the afterlife?”
Horne didn’t know who asked the question, and it didn’t matter.
Carter answered it without even looking back. “It is true that we’ve documented individuals who have long since been declared legally dead on Earth, some hundreds of years ago.
“However, we think this is a very rare occurrence, that only one in maybe a thousand people are truly great dreamers, able to sustain themselves beyond death without help. Even with help, very few people are able to make the transition.” Carter cast a backward glance and seemed to frown with disappointment. “You have to remember, boys,” shouted Carter as he took a switchback on another flight, “the journey is worth it. Once you get to the Dream Lands, you’ll be different, able to do things that you hadn’t even believed possible before. This isn’t Earth. It might look a lot like it and most of the physical laws are the same, but there are subtle differences and peculiarities.”
Horne perked up and refocused on the back of Carter’s helmet. “You’re talking about magic.”
Carter shook his head. “Not magic, metaphysics. The people who built this alternate reality tweaked it slightly, made it just a little more fantastic than our world.” Carter glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, and before I forget, in Ulthar never kill a cat.”
That was the seventh time Carter had told Horne the injunction about cats. It made him wonder what would happen if he did and if it applied only to Ulthar or to the whole of the Dream Lands? Did other places have similar but different rules? In Oriab, was it illegal to kill a dog?
Horne wiped his brow with the back of his glove. He was sweating; the forced march was getting to him. Out in the fog, in the darkness, a pattern was forming. At first, it looked like circles, a pattern of rings, but sometimes, it looked like a square or like a square and a triangle—but most of the time it looked like circles. It was as if the fog and the darkness beyond weren’t there at all but were merely a complex of layered patterns; patterns that, as Horne went on, began to resolve into things that were not circles. The pattern was there in the steps, as well. It was the same shape iterated over and over again as if someone had printed the concept of stairs over a sheet of paper with a watermark embedded within. Not a circle but something geometric with angles. It took him a moment.
Horne squinted and widened his eyes to try and make it come into focus. It was five-sided with equal angles: a pentagon, like the one in Virginia.
Like the one he’d seen during training in Antarctica, the one that was made of grey stone and hummed and whistled as men walked past. You could tell how old it was just by looking at it; it felt ancient,
and it told you so deep down in the base of your brain. The pentagon that was all liquid black inside, so black that even the targeting lasers vanished. The pentagon that they fed soldier after soldier after soldier into, forcing him to watch until it was his turn at last. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t scream as that liquid black nothing swallowed him whole. That had been days ago, hours maybe; he wasn’t sure. On the stairs, time meant little. As he continued forward, all he could think about was the pentagonal patterns forming around him and the number five.
He blurted out the number, and he wasn’t alone. A whole chorus of his fellow soldiers had said it as well. He looked around and did a head count. There were only ten of them, not counting Carter.
Carter responded, “The builders, the Progenitors, or—in the old language—the Q’Hrell, were pentaradially symmetrical in design. Their entire bodies and even their brains were divided into five sections. Not unexpectedly, they incorporated that number into much of their machinery, architecture, and art. The Dream Lands are no exception. The fundamental programming, which the psychophysicists call the quintessence, is five-dimensional in nature. Your brains might perceive this as random appearances of patterns involving the number five.”
Carter’s voice helped him to focus, to keep walking. Horne thought back to his classes in physics at Florida Tech. How Professor Benjamin Scapellati had discussed the theories of supra-asymmetry and how some dimensions acted as regulators on others. He tried to meld that half-remembered lecture with what Carter was telling them. If the Dream Lands were only based on five dimensions, the constraints would be different. Physical laws as dictated by the higher dimensions would be absent. The possibilities might be immensely terrifying but wondrous as well.
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 18
