She drank. “Come on, that’s just old nonsense. Anyway, aren’t you the one saying we have to judge a culture by their own standards? So they liked a bit of the old human sacrifice every now and then, like the Aztecs. Perfectly normal.”
He frowned. “I don’t know... It’s different. Somehow. Most human sacrifice, there’s a point, you know? Make the sun rise, make the crops grow, make the gods smile down on you, turn their backs on your enemies. But these... nothing. When Eleanor asked them why their ancestors killed, she was told because that’s what you do for the gods. It’s just what they expect. No rhyme or reason to it. Just... because.”
“What do you expect. They’re gods. Let’s eat.”
“That’s what they said.”
♦
The office was filled with red string. Glay was in the middle of it, ducking and weaving through the web. “Come on then, don’t just stand there gawping. Work to do!”
“What are you doing?”
He grinned that mad grin at her. “This is an unusual phenomenon.”
“I can see that.”
“Requires an unusual methodology! Look, duck through here.” He gave her his hand and they threaded under the weave. “As the data comes in, it goes on the wall over there. The length of the wall here represents time, and recorded energy goes up against the vertical. On the opposite wall, the other fundamental particles. The thread shows the pattern.”
She moved closer. “They’re showing the same data as they always did.”
“But the figures for this one keep changing – look, see the way these threads cross?”
Five threads, crossing each other randomly as far as Rebecca could tell. “I’m not seeing it.”
“You just have to look harder! Grab yourself some drawing pins from the table, and we’ll add today’s data.” He stood up, framed by red. “The pattern’s there, I’m sure of it. We just need to clarify things. Make them stand out more.”
“I need some coffee,” she said.
“Go on, then! Charge us up! Let’s crack this thing.” He interlaced his fingers and pushed his palms towards her, and she heard the bones in his fingers click.
♦
Rebecca walked through a dark city. A few moments ago – when? – Paul had been with her. Now she was alone.
The buildings were half-ruined, and the sky was black. It had to be daytime because the sun was out, she could see it (and why didn’t it burn out her eyes, she was looking straight at it, how could she do that?) and the sky was black.
But even beyond the black sky, beyond the yellow sun, she could feel the stars looking down on her.
“Paul?” She walked down the empty street. “Paul?”
But there was no response.
I’m dreaming, she thought. It’s just a nightmare. I’ll wake up in a moment.
So that was fine. Just a nightmare. Not like you’ve not had nightmares before. That last time, the time that you swore you’d never eat so much brie before bed again? It’s just like that, only no robots this time. Just another boring old nightmare.
She felt cold. Had she felt the cold in a nightmare before, or was this new? Maybe she’d just always dressed warm in dreams before, so she wouldn’t have even noticed if she’d been dreaming of the cold.
She shivered.
She was in bed with Paul, she knew that. They’d gone to bed, and she was dreaming. She was snuggled up next to him, bodies warming each other in the bed in the night, and there was nothing to be afraid of. Just another boring old nightmare.
There was something, though. In the distance. She could feel it ahead of her in the dark, and she knew, suddenly, that she didn’t want to go there any more, didn’t want to keep taking step after step in this empty city with no people, didn’t want to keep heading towards (what?) to keep walking towards (what was it?) the thing that was ahead of her in the dark day which the sun didn’t light.
Yet she carried on walking down the empty street in the darkest of days with the blazing yellow sun in a sky of purest black and she knew that she had to wake up (she was getting closer to it now) had to wake up really quickly, because she didn’t want to see what was there (it was big, she could feel it in the distance) and any moment now it would perceive her (how?) and then it would know where she was.
She tried to call out Paul’s name, but she couldn’t. She whimpered. A low sound in the throat.
She couldn’t wake up.
She moaned again.
She needed to wake up because it could SEE her and she didn’t know how long (how fast could it travel?) before it was upon her and she NEEDED TO WAKE UP NOW and she made the noise again, moaning as loudly as she could through her closed mouth (why couldn’t she just open it and speak?) in the dark city with the yellow sun and the black sky and the empty stars and the ruined buildings and the thing that was moving towards her and it was larger than the buildings and god it KNEW WHERE SHE WAS and she moaned again, low sound in the throat, urgent, and it was almost upon her –
– and she was lying in her own bed, Paul shaking her awake and looking concerned in the half-light leaking through the closed curtains.
“What was going on?” he asked. “You were making this horrible sound.”
She grabbed him, and held him as tightly as she could, as if she could squeeze the life right out of him.
“Hey. It’s all right. Nightmare?”
“Yes.”
He held her in silence for a while before she spoke again.
“I needed to wake up, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t wake up. But I knew you were next to me, and all I needed to do was let you know, and you’d wake me up.” She squeezed again.
“That’s all right,” he said. But it came out muffled, because she was holding him so tight.
♦
The web had grown overnight. It seemed to have taken over most of the room now, and the furniture was gone.
“Professor Glay?” she called into the office.
“Over here!” The voice came from behind the door.
Weaving gently through the web, Rebecca made her way to where Glay was sitting on the floor. He held half a dozen strings, and was busily tacking them into the carpet.
“I’ve been tracking the frequency of the shifts. Look, they’re all converging here.”
“Here?”
“Mm? Oh, yes, I’m using the floor as a fourth dimension. Once we get down here, then we can start to see the primary. See? When the beams start to stutter, we can map the frequency here. And look!”
Rebecca looked up at the tangle of thread over his head. From where she was it haloed him like a religious painting.
She knelt beside him. “We’re not going to have much of an office left if you carry on like this.”
“Hm? Yes, yes. Absolutely right. It’s just that there’s a larger cycle here, I’m sure of it. Something about the numbers is off. The rhythm is wrong.”
“The rhythm.”
“Yes, yes, the rhythm.” He tapped with his fingers on the floor. “The rhythm is wrong. The numbers are wrong.”
“They can’t be wrong. There must be something wrong with the collider. It’s an engineering problem.”
“But if it’s not, then the numbers are changing. But the numbers can’t be changing. So that must mean that we’re changing.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“Not yet. Not yet.”
“Look, you’ve been thinking about this too much. How long have you been working on it?”
“I don’t know. Last night. The night before. It’s almost there.”
“Why don’t you take a rest? A day off.”
“It won’t help. Everything is changing. We’re moving out of the human section now.”
“What?”
“We’re leaving the world behind. That’s what it is. Everything is going to change. Everything.”
“Professor?”
He said nothing, lost in thought, fingers thrum-thrum-thrumming on the carpeted floor.
“I’ll go and get someone.” She stood, backed away. Glay made no move to follow her, sat there staring at his scarlet threads, looking lost in the corner of his web, connected to the walls of the office by lines of gossamer. Spider or fly? she thought.
“It won’t help,” he said.
“What won’t help?”
“We’re moving away. The planets are spinning and the stars are moving and we’re moving too, farther and farther away from what we were. The Earth moves around the sun, and the sun moves around the centre of the galaxy, and the galaxy moves within the centre of the universe, wheels within wheels within wheels, all moving and changing and altering as we’re altering. And it’s the universal constants, Rebecca. They’re changing.”
She was at the door. “I’m going to the medical centre. I’ll be back in a bit.”
He didn’t move. Sat there. Looking down at the carpet, the drawing pins pinning the red string to the floor. He muttered something.
“What was that?” she said.
Glay looked up at her. Rebecca had never seen his eyes so sad. “Everything will be different now.”
She walked quickly to fetch the doctor, but Glay was gone when she returned.
♦
The day was warm. They sat on an old blue blanket and ate tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches on the grassy area outside the red brick walls of the admin building.
“D’you think they’ll lock him up?” asked Paul.
“Until he gets better,” Rebecca said. “I mean, he was rambling about the universal constants changing.”
“Pretend I’m management.”
She laughed at that. “Universal constants. Things that are the same everywhere. If they were to change, the world would work differently. Like... Like the strong nuclear force. That’s the force that holds all of the protons and neutrons in the middle of an atom together. If it’s a bit higher, the stars burn out too fast. The elements fuse together too quickly, all the way to cold iron, and they never last long enough for us to evolve. A bit lower, and the stars never light in the first place. A dead universe, filled with nothing but hydrogen.”
“Hold on. So you’re saying the universe was explicitly created for people then?”
“Sort of. But you’re looking at it the wrong way,” she said. “It’s more that people were created by the universe. If the universal constants had different numbers, maybe nothing would’ve happened. Maybe nothing could evolve at all. But if nothing evolved in a universe, there’d be no one to look up at the stars and say: Wow. What a coincidence that the universe happens to be just right for people to live in.”
“But if the numbers are changing, doesn’t that mean we’re all going to die?”
“We’re all going to die. That, and pay taxes. Shouldn’t really come as a surprise. But no, I don’t think the numbers are changing.”
“But your big machine says that they are.”
“Then the big machine must be wrong.”
“Tested that, have you?”
♦
She was in the dream again. This time, a basement. Above, there was no house, just the carved out area of the basement, as if the house had been sheared off the top. Wind played across the open gap of the shear, a harsh moaning sound.
And the sky was black.
She walked up the steps – stone, flagged – that led up to the city (was the city there? she was dreaming again, she knew that she was dreaming again) and looked out across it.
This time, she wasn’t alone. Figures, a dozen of them. (Did she know one? The closest looked familiar...) They were staggered across the distance, across the ruined street (cracks a foot deep crazing the surface of the road) and facing towards (don’t look there, you mustn’t look there) where?
No. She wouldn’t look that way.
Rebecca turned the other way.
And there it was, above her. Huge, impenetrable, indefinite, darkness against the darkness (were those eyes?) slipping in and out of her vision (a suggestion of blackness against the black, but worse, somehow) and then she felt it look at her, and it knew that she was there.
This time, she woke him by screaming.
♦
She was unsticking the pins, removing the threads, taking down the remnants of Glay’s spiderweb of data, when Paul knocked on the door.
“Busy?” he asked. “I thought we could get lunch.”
“Just getting rid of – ” She gestured at the tangle of thread criss-crossing the room. “– well, this.”
He came carefully in. “What is it?”
“Glay’s idiosyncratic way of analysing the data coming from the supercollider.”
“Looks like a star.”
“What?” She threaded herself to the door.
“Look. There.”
And it did. The red threads criss-crossed themselves into a seven-pointed star, off to one side of the room. She ducked her head; the jumble of threads shifted into noise again.
“Is it supposed to do that?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know. I think he kind of... lost it at the end. But he was talking about stars.”
“So why’s it a star?”
“I don’t know!”
He stopped dead, looked at her.
She sighed. “Sorry. It’s just – well, the dreams.”
“It’s all right.” He opened his arms, an offering.
She went inside to be held for a moment. “Look, I didn’t mean to snap. Let’s do lunch.”
He squeezed her. “Sure.”
As they left the room, she asked, “What made you think of lunch today, anyway? I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Ah, I talked to Eleanor on the satphone earlier. She said – can you believe this – she said the natives were restless. I think she thought she was being funny.”
“Ha. So she’s out sleeping in the jungle and we’re the ones having scary dreams. Ironic.”
“I asked her about the gods. She told me they weren’t really gods at all. They were the things that existed before the gods did. And that they’d return again.”
“That’s... spooky.”
She closed the door behind them as they left. It locked with a satisfying click.
♦
When she returned to the office the door was open. Just a crack. But open.
“Professor?” said Rebecca. “Professor Glay?”
It had to be him. He must have come back. Maybe he was feeling better.
She pushed the door open the rest of the way. All of her undone work had been re-done. The threads she’d removed put back in place, and more added. Red string, crossing and re-crossing the office.
There was a star in the centre of the room.
She moved slowly across the threshold. As her point of view changed, a different star appeared. Five points. Three points. Six points. As she moved through the room and one parallaxed away, another would come into existence, formed by strings that had previously seemed to have no connection.
The room was empty but for the stars, born of the connections between the data sheets pinned to the wall, the floor.
There were stars everywhere.
♦
She knew where he’d be. As she entered the chamber, Glay was standing in front of the sphere, just as she knew that he would be. (And how did you know that? a small part of her mind needled. How could she possibly have known that?)
She closed the door behind her. There it was. The low harmonics, starting to
build as the loop began to charge.
He turned towards her. Unshaven. Dirty. Unclean. “It won’t be long now,” he said.
She didn’t move into the room, kept one hand on the door handle. “How long have you been down here?”
Glay seemed confused for a moment. “I don’t remember.” He looked at her and seemed to focus. “Rebecca?”
“Yes?”
“You dreamed it too, didn’t you? The black sky, the dreadful winds. The truth. That the numbers are changing again.”
She said nothing.
“They were never constants. Not really. Just in that part of the galaxy that we’ve been swirling through for the last few thousand years. Only there. Myths, fairy stories, that’s what we thought they were. I’ve been dreaming too, Rebecca.”
He stepped towards her, and she gripped the handle more tightly, ready to turn and run if she had to.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I’ll save you if I can.” The hum grew louder, the power building. Glay cocked his head, listening. “I have to go.” He moved quickly to the sphere and started unfastening the clips on the access hatch.
“Don’t do it,” she said.
He ignored her, continuing to open the clips holding the door shut. “It won’t be long now.”
“What won’t?”
“Till it all changes.” He paused for a moment. “Did we bring it on? Did we change the constants ourselves, by seeking them? We’ve never been able to observe before, not that far down into the soup of quarks. Did we bring the change on ourselves, or did we just happen to measure it at the time of the change?”
Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft Page 2
