Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft; Various

  “So,” Njord grated. “So, the great planet thus announces its presence.” He grimaced as automatic materials-reclamation servos skittered futilely, seeking recoverable proteoids from the aborted congress.

  Sri Gomati, enigmatic silvered cyberoptics glittering, turned to face the disgruntled Njord, the ambiguous Shoten. “Can you see it yet?” she asked. “Can you get a visual fix?”

  Shoten Binayakya reached a cyberclaw, tapped a visual extensor control. Biotic brains keyed to obey any crew member activated the extensor, guided it toward one glittering optic. The shimmering field crept aside; input receptacles opened, ready for the insertion of fiber-optic conductors.

  A click, silence.

  D68/Y37/C22/FLASH

  Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha’s coronation was splendid. Never before had the South Polar Jerusalem seen such pomp, such display of pageantry and power. Thousands of slaves, naked and gilded and draped in jewelry and feathers, paraded up the wide boulevard before the Imperial Palace. They drew, by ropes of woven gold and weizmannium, glittering juggernauts. Fountains sprayed scented wine. Chamberlains threw fistfuls of xanthic shekels to cheering crowds.

  The climax of the spectacle was the march of the anthrocyberphants, resplendent mutated elephants whose cerebellums had been surgically removed at birth and replaced with spheres of human brain material cultured from clone-cells donated (involuntarily in some cases) by the greatest scientists, scholars, and intellectuals in Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha’s realm. When the anthrocyberphants were well grown and into their adolescence, their gonads were surgically removed and replaced with a variety of electronic implants, including inertial guidance computers, magnetic compass-gyroscopes, neural transceivers.

  The anthrocyberphants pranced and tumbled down the grand boulevard before the Imperial Palace, trumpeting melodies from Wagner, Mendelssohn, Bach, Mozart, vain self-portraiture by Richard Strauss, erotic fantasies by Scriabin, extended lines from Britten, discordant percussives by Edgard varèse, all in perfect orchestral harmony, all punctuated by the sounds of tympani, timbales, kettledrums, and cymbals held in writhing flexible tentacles that grew from nodes at the marchers’ shoulders.

  Upon the silken-draped and jewel-encrusted balcony of the Imperial Palace, the Ultimate Monarch of Laddino Imperium smiled and waved, bowed, applauded, turned to turbaned chamberlains, and grasped fistfuls of commemorative favors to toss graciously upon the marchers and the cheering crowds come to celebrate the grand ceremonial.

  The Laddino Imperium included all of the grand Antarctic domain of the former Israel-in-Exile and the expanded territory of Greater Hai Brasil that had extended to claim hegemony over all of the Americas, from Hudson’s Bay to Patagonia, before falling under sway of the South Polar nation. The Ultimate Monarch, Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha, bowed, waved, tossed favors to the crowd. Deep in the bowels of the earth beneath once-frozen plains and mountains, huge gyroscopes throbbed into life.

  The axis of the earth began to shift through a lengthy and carefully computed cycle. None but the servants and advisors of the Ultimate Monarch had been consulted, and none but the will of Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha, the Ultimate Monarch, was considered. The ambition of Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha was to give every citizen of the planet earth, every square meter of territory, a fair and equitable access to the wealth, the beauty, the joy, the light, the warmth of the sun.

  As the huge gyroscopes whirled their massive flywheels, the earth shifted its ancient tilt.

  The fanatic hordes of Nrisimha, the Little Lion, poured from the city of Medina in the ancient Arabian desert, conquering all before them in the holy name of the Little Lion of God. The forces of Novum Romanum, the empire built by Fortuna Pales, and of the New Khmer Domain, created a century before by Vidya Devi, slaughtered the followers of the Little Lion Nrisimha by the hundreds of thousands, then by the millions.

  How could Nrisimha continue to replace the decimated armies? How many soldiers could the single city of Medina produce? What was the secret of the fanatical hordes?

  No one knew.

  But they poured forth, fearless, unstoppable, unslowable, unturnable. All that the forces of resistance could do was slaughter them by the million, and they fell, they fell, but their fellows only marched across their very bodies, their strange bodies that did not putrefy like the corpses of normal soldiers but seemed instead to turn to an amorphous gel and then to sink into the earth itself, leaving behind no sign of their presence, not even uniforms or weapons or equipment, but only, in the wake of their passage, fields of strange flowers and fruits that bloomed gorgeously into towering pillars and petals and berries the size of melons, that produced sweet narcotic fumes and brought to those who harvested and ate them dreams of haunting beauty and incomparable weirdness.

  Strange messengers sped across the sands of the deserts of Africa and Asia bearing the word that the Little Lion Nrisimha had come to bring peace and glory and splendor to a new Empire, to Khmeric Gondwanaland, an absolute dictatorship of unparalleled benevolence that would stretch from Siberia to Ireland and from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Good Hope.

  It took remarkably few years for the followers of the Little Lion Nrisimha to complete their conquest, and few more for the establishment of an efficient infrastructure and the appointment of regional satrapies under the absolute command of Nrisimha.

  Khmeric Gondwanaland was a roaring success.

  It was less than a century from the complete triumph of Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha throughout the Laddino Imperium and that of Nrisimha the Little Lion in Khmeric Gondwanaland, when the two great empires were driven into union by the eruption of attacking batrachian forces from beneath the seas of the planet. How long these strange froglike intelligences had lived in their deep and gloomy metropoli hundreds of meters beneath the surface of the earth’s oceans will remain forever imponderable.

  What stimulated them to rise and attack the land-dwelling nations of the earth is also unknown, although in all likelihood the steady shifting of the earth’s axis brought about by the gargantuan subterranean gyroscopes of Yamm Kerit ben Chibcha was in fact the cause of the attacks.

  The Deep Ones emerged and waded ashore in all regions at once. They wore only strangely crafted bangles and ornaments of uncorroded metal. They carried weapons resembling the barbed tridents of marine legendry. They dragged behind them terrible stone statues of indescribable extramundane monstrosities before which they conducted rites of blasphemous abandon and unmentionable perversion.

  The Laddino Imperium and Khmeric Gondwanaland combined their respective might to deal with the menace, to drive the strange Deep Ones back into the murky realms from which they had emerged. By the year 2337 a unified earth lay once more tranquil and prosperous beneath a glowing and benevolent sun.

  The menace of the Deep Ones, at least for the time, was over.

  And billions of kilometers from earth, humanity renewed its heroic thrust toward the outermost regions of the solar system.

  MARCH 15, 2337

  “Not yet,” Shoten Binayakya’s voice clattered.

  “Soon,” Gomati countered. She hooked into Khons’s radar sensor, letting cyborged biots convert incoming pulses into pseudovisuals. “Look!” she exclaimed. “It’s a whole system!”

  Njord Freyr stirred, determined to pull his attention away from frustration, direct it toward a topic that would involve. “There, there,” he heard Gomati’s voice, not sure whether it was organic or synthesized, “shift your input to ultra-v!”

  Njord, hooking into Khons’s external sensors, complied.

  “Astounding!”

  “Yet so.”

  “Not unprecedented. On the contrary,” Shoten Binayakya interjected. “All the giants have complex systems of moons. Jupiter. Saturn. Uranus. Search your memory banks if you don’t recall.”

  Surlily, Njord sped unnecessary inquiry to an implanted cyberbiot. “Mmh,” he grunted. “So. Almost thirty significant satellites among them. Plus the trash. So.” He nodded.

 
“And this new giant—?”

  “Not new,” Njord corrected. “It’s been there all along, as long as any of the others. You know the old Laplace notion of elder planets and younger planets was abandoned about the same time as the solid atom and the flat earth.”

  “Good work, Freyr,” Shoten shot sarcastically.

  “Well then?”

  Sri Gomati said, “Clearly, Njord, Shoten meant newly discovered.” She paused for a fraction of a second. “And about to be newly visited.”

  Njord breathed a sigh of annoyance. “Well. And that old European, what’s-his-name, Galapagos saw the major moons of Jupiter seven hundred years ago. All the others followed as soon as the optical telescope was developed. They didn’t even need radiation sensors, no less probes to find them. Seven hundred years.”

  “Seven hundred twenty-seven, Njord.” Sri Gomati petted him gently on his genitals.

  “You and your obsession with ancient history! I don’t see how you qualified for this mission, Gomati, always chasing after obscure theorizers and writers!”

  “It’s hardly an obsession. Galileo was one of the key figures in the history of science. And he found the four big Jovian moons in 1610. It’s simple arithmetic to subtract that from 2337 and get seven-two-seven. I didn’t even have to call on a cyberbiot to compute that, Njord dear.”

  “Argh!” The flesh remnants in Njord’s face grew hot.

  Shoten Binayakya interrupted the argument. “There it comes into visual range!” he exclaimed. “After these centuries, the perturbations of Uranus and Neptune solved at last. Planet X!”

  Njord sneered. “You have a great predilection for the melodramatic, Shoten! Planet X, indeed!”

  “Why,” Shoten laughed, the sound fully synthesized, “it’s a happy coincidence, Njord dear. Lowell applied the term to his mystery planet, meaning X the unknown. Until Tombaugh found it and named it Pluto. But now it is not only X the unknown but also X the tenth planet as well. Very neat!”

  Njord began a reply but paused as the distant planet became visible through Khons’s sensors. It was indeed a system like those of the inner giant planets, and radar sensings pouring through Khons’s external devices, filtered and processed by cyberbiotic brains, overwhelmed his own consciousness.

  A great dark body swam through the blackness, reflecting almost no light from the distant sun but glowing darkly, menacingly, pulsating in slow heartbeatlike waves, with a low crimson radiance that pained Njord subliminally even through the ship’s mechanisms and the processing of the cyberbiots. Fascinated yet repelled, Njord stared at the glowing, pulsing globe.

  About its obscene oblateness whirled a family of smaller bodies, themselves apparently dim and lifeless, yet illuminated by the raking sinister tone of their parent.

  “Yuggoth,” Sri Gomati’s low whisper jolted Njord from his reverie. “Yuggoth,” and again, “Yuggoth!”

  Njord snapped, “What’s that?”

  “Yuggoth,” repeated Sri Gomati.

  The male hissed in annoyance, watched the great pulsating bulk loom larger in Khons’s external sensors, watched its family of moons, themselves behaving like toy planets in orbit around the glowing body’s miniature sun.

  “The great world must be Yuggoth,” Sri Gomati crooned. “And the lesser ones Nithon, Zaman; the whirling pair—see them, see!—Thog and its twin Thok with the foul lake where puffed shoggoths splash.”

  “Do you know what she is raving about?” Njord demanded of Shoten Binayakya, but Shoten only shook that ambivalent satiny head, two silvery eyes shimmering, stainless steel upper and lower monodont revealed by drawn-back organic lips.

  Khons’s remote sensors had accumulated enough data now, the ship’s cyberbiots computed and reduced the inputs, to provide a set of readouts on the new planetary grouping’s characteristics. Shoten raised a telescoping cyberimplant and pointed toward a glowing screen where data crept slowly from top to bottom.

  “See,” the ambiguous, synthesized voice purled, “the planet’s mass is gigantic. Double that of Jupiter. As great as six hundred earths! More oblate even than Jupiter also—what is its spin?” Shoten paused while more lines of information crept onto the screen. “Its rotation is even shorter than Jupiter’s. Its surface speed must be—” He paused and sent a command through the ship’s neurocyber network, grinned at the response that appeared on the screen.

  “Think of resting on the surface of that planet and whirling about at eighty thousand kilometers an hour!”

  Njord Freyr rose from his rest-couch. In fact the least extensively cyborged of the three, he retained three of his original organic limbs. He pulled himself around, using Khons’s interior freefall handholds to steady himself, hooked his strongly servomeched arm through two handholds, and gestured angrily from Shoten to Sri Gomati.

  “We can all read the screens. I asked what this Eurasian bitch was babbling about!”

  “Now, dear,” Shoten Binayakya purred ambiguously.

  Sri Gomati’s shimmering silvery eyes seemed for once not totally masked, but fixed on some distant vision. Her hands—one fitted with an array of scientific and mechanical implements, the other implanted with a multitude of flexible cartilaginous organs equally suited for technical manipulation and erotic excesses—wove and fluttered before her face. She spoke as much to herself or to some absent, invisible entity as to Njord Freyr or Shoten Binayakya. It was as if she instructed the batches of cyberbiotic brains that populated the electronic network of the ship.

  “March 15, 2337, earth standard time,” she crooned. “It would please him. It would please him to know that he is remembered. That he was right in his own day. But how, I wonder, could he have known? Did he merely guess? Was he in contact with entities from beyond? Beings from this strange, gray world past the starry void, this pale, shadowy land?

  “Dead four hundred years this day, Howard, does your dust lie in ancient ground still? Could some later Curwen not have raised your essential salts?”

  “Madness!” Njord Freyr broke in. With his organic hand he struck Gomati’s face, his palm rebounding from the hard bone and the harder metal implanted beneath her flesh.

  Her glittering eyes aflash, she jerked her head away, at the same time twisting to fix him with her angry glare. A circuit of tension sprang into being between them, lips of both writhing, faces animated in mute quarrel. Beyond this, neither moved.

  Only the interruption of Shoten Binayakya’s commanding speech broke the tense immobility. “While you carried out your spat, dears, I had the cyberbiots plot our orbit through the new system.”

  “The system of Yuggoth,” Gomati reiterated.

  “As you wish.”

  The data screen went to abstract blobs for fractions of a second, then it was filled with a glowing diagram of the new system: the oblate pulsating planet, its scabrous surface features whirling in the center of the screen; the smaller rocky moons revolving rapidly about their master.

  “We can land only once,” Shoten purred. “We must carefully select our touchdown point. Then later expeditions may explore further. But if we choose poorly, the worlds may abandon this Yuggoth”—Gomati’s name for the great planet was spoken sardonically—“forever.” Shoten’s cyborged head nodded in self-affirmation, then the synthesized words were repeated, “Yes, forever.”

  15032137—READOUT

  The Asia-Pacific Co-prosperity Sphere continued to evolve. It was, beyond question, the center of world power, economic development, political leadership. It was also a gigantic realm sprawling across continents and oceans, including scores of great cities and billions of citizens.

  Its first city was Beijing. Secondary centers of authority were established in Lhasa, Bombay, Mandalay, Quezon City, Adelaide, Christ-church, Santa Ana.

  The first great leader of the Sphere, Vo Tran Quoc, had become a figure of legendary proportions within a century of his death. Schools contended as to his true identity. Despite his name, he was not Vietnamese. That much was known. One group
of scholars held that he was a Maori. Another, that he was an Ainu. A third, that he was a Bengali woman, the product of rape during the war of independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan, posing as a man (or possibly having undergone a sex-change operation involving the grafting of a donated penis and testes).

  At any rate, Vo Tran Quoc died.

  In the wake of his death a struggle broke out. Some who contended for the power of the dead leader did so on the basis of purely personal ambition. Others, from ideological conviction. The great ideological dispute of the year 2137 dealt with the proper interpretation of an ancient political dictum.

  The ancient political dictum was: Just as there is not a single thing in the world without a dual nature, so imperialism and all reactionaries have a dual nature—they are real tigers and paper tigers at the same time.

  While political theorists in Beijing quarreled over the meaning of this political dictum, a new force arose with its center in the eldritch city of Angkor Wat deep in the jungles of old Cambodia. The new political force brought about a world feminist order. Its leader, following the example of Vo Tran Quoc, took the name of a mythic personage from another culture than her own.

  She proclaimed a New Khmer Empire stretching from the Urals to the Rockies.

  She took the name Vidya Devi. This means goddess of wisdom.

  The former Slavic domain and the Maghreb suffered rivalry that led, after a century, to convergence and ultimate amalgamation. The old Roman Empire was reborn. It included all of Europe, the Near East, Africa, and North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. (Niagara Falls now poured its waters directly into the ocean; the former west bank of the Hudson River was choice seashore property. The Rockies overlooked pounding waves that stretched to the Asian shore.)