Dark Horizons

by Jay Caselberg; Eric Del Carlo

  Except …

  Except that she did see. The loneliness and stress produced visions in her mind. She’d looked to her instruments first, of course, the “Christmas tree” panel lights all still glowing green, just in case it might be some bad mix of air. She’d checked and re-checked again, thinking at one point she might call NASA to ask their opinion, but, no, she had best not—why cause needless worries? It was only the loneliness after all, that and the fitfulness of her sleep habits, despite the schedule of sleep-times NASA had asked her to follow.

  But how could she have slept otherwise, now that Gyorgi and the others were on the moon’s surface?

  And so the visions came, these from the books she had hoarded that autumn. The dreams of a Heinlein, naive and hope-filled, mixed with the more cautious, Gallic optimism of Verne. And the darker, although still ambiguous, visions of Wells and Poe—Poe, with his bleakness, his soul-searing horror, still having his astronaut dream, too, of fields of Selenite poppies. Of lakes and forests.

  But, then, Lovecraft’s colors. His dreams of far Yuggoth. Her own dreams, no less terrible for their having been lived once, of Hitler and Stalin, of KGB horrors. Poe at his worst still foresaw some brightness, some faint trace of Byelobog. While the other, his fellow American prophet of darkness …

  She didn’t complete the thought. Something was happening. Lights played on rock spires—spaceships as she saw, but still looking stone-like to the others. And now behind them as they climbed the talus of Tsiolkovsky’s mountain.

  “Over here, quickly!” The voice was not Gyorgi’s. Rather, the Frenchman’s, also with an accent. She watched as the camera panned, saw his lights sparkle. And then … deeper darkness.

  “I don’t know, Gyorgi.” The voices crackled. “What do you think then?”

  “A cavern of some sort.”

  No, Gyorgi! She thought. But he could not hear her. Nor could she call down to the L.M. to warn them, because there was no one inside to receive the call, and their suit radios were designed only for communications between one another.

  And so she could only watch as they entered. Half seeing, half dreaming—was it a cave mouth? Some huge sort of airlock?

  She still heard their voices, that much of her still tracking them on the monitor.

  “Sloping down … ”

  “Smooth floored. Almost circular in its cross-section … ”

  “Almost—what do you think?”

  “Almost as if it were artificial … ”

  She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening, while at the same time she still stared at the TV. The sudden swirling beneath the men’s feet, as if their descent took them into a mist….

  “Some kind of gas, maybe. Do you know what this means?”

  “That the moon has an atmosphere of sorts. But so thin, so tenuous, that it exists only beneath the surface. Look, you go out—check the wire antenna. Make sure we’re still broadcasting up to the C.M. Then bring back a container of some sort for a sample.”

  She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening. She saw a huge comet, and yet not a comet. A spaceship itself, crashing into the moon. Blasting a crater two hundred and more kilometers wide—the aftershock throwing up its central mountain. The occupant, wounded …

  Byelobog shattered. Dead. Chernobog crawling out, once the moon’s floor had cooled, finding a cleft in the newly formed mountain. A hole to bore into. To bide its time … hiding.

  And on the TV screen, the mist coalescing. Shadowy, whirling.

  Forming tendrils.

  The vision of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. A hollow stone turning, revealing metal. Tentacles reaching out. Except …

  Except much vaster.

  Edgar Allan Poe’s horrors most stern and most appalling, yet vaster and darker still.

  What she saw now, her mind’s grasp expanding …

  To bide its time from the time the moon was young, over the eons, until it was stronger. And while it was waiting, to draw others to it.

  The children, perhaps, of spores it had scattered on its mad journey—some, even, that came to Earth—to draw their strength back into its own body.

  And even it, perhaps the smallest of entities …

  Coalescing. She saw. In her dream, she tried to send—somehow—some warning to Gyorgi.

  That something stared back at her.

  Knowing. Not knowing. The myths were metaphors. Human and nonhuman, all of the same spawn. Dazhbog and Myesyats. Byelobog. Chernobog. All of them part of the same dark evil …

  Tasha woke, crying, to NASA’s frantic calls via the space station, demanding to know why she had stopped transmitting. Outside she could see the Earth, bathed in full sunlight. Yet cold and colorless.

  On the TV, static. There was no picture.

  She closed her eyes, straining. Trying to dream again. Trying to find some trace of her husband.

  Then, slowly, she sat up and straightened her clothing and opened the C.M.’s own, separate transmission link, wondering as she did what exact words she could use to tell NASA.

  There would be no springtime.

  GOSPEL OF THE ASCENDED MACHINES

  AARON J. FRENCH

  LLOYD MARTINSON SLAMMED ON the brakes in the seat next to me, bringing his shiny red Toyota to a halt. I jostled against the leather, feeling pain in my lower back, my arm coming to rest on the windowsill.

  As he keyed the ignition, everything went silent. Bird-and-nature sounds filtered through the miles of oak and cedar. He got out, lighting a cigarette and remarking, “Nothing beats the old outdoors—eh, Eric?”

  Blood pumped in my ears. I felt like strangling Lloyd. I wasn’t averse to off-road driving, but sitting in that bouncing cab for the last hour had been a nightmare.

  I joined my fellow scholar by the hood where he was smoking and gazed into the dense tangles of branches. I noticed a pathway of flat stones snaking through the trunks.

  “You never said middle of nowhere,” I said, hands tense.

  “Will you take it easy? This is where my friend keeps his research quarters.”

  Research quarters. The term called to mind everything I’d grown to loathe about the academic world and its scholars; namely, that they sequestered themselves like monks, their “work” being the only thing of importance.

  “Why bring me to see this … friend, Lloyd?”

  “I didn’t bring you to see him. I brought you to witness what he is going to do.”

  I turned. In the thinning sunlight Lloyd’s baldhead and glasses made him appear slightly robotic, even alien. “Finals are in two weeks and my TA is brainless,” I said.

  Lloyd rolled his eyes.

  “And I have three—not two, three—book reports to wrap up. Donald Bragdiam has been after me to publish. I haven’t done so in two years.”

  Lloyd laughed. “Your department head is a dinosaur. Just tell him you published, then lie about the journal. Besides I thought you said you wrapped up your William Blake book already.”

  “Not yet.”

  “You’re still without your first book-length publication?”

  I nodded.

  “No wonder you’re upset. Publish or perish, as they say.”

  Lloyd crushed his cigarette beneath his heel, draping an arm around me. His tone waxed conspiratorial. “We started this group so we could discover the truth–”

  “–which resulted in Kate leaving me.”

  He nodded, as if to commiserate. “That was an unfortunate but necessary first step,” he said, dismissing my recent divorce. “Self-knowledge breeds self-sacrifice; afterward comes self-attainment.”

  “Hubbard? Jung? Or Wilber?”

  He dropped his arm, then his eyes. “We approach this differently. You’re a mystic; I’m a psychologist and a scientist.”

  “I’m a professor of World Literature–” I hated when he labeled me a mystic, as though I lacked reason; to my mind, I was simply a philosopher “–and you’re hardly a trained scientist.”

  “My p
oint is, you think this will happen naturally, provided you’re able to transmute your own feelings. I’m more pessimistic. I don’t think we can do this on our own. Human beings are weak. I feel we must turn our attention to the machine.”

  “Kate’s with you on that,” I said. “She’s a long way from her Jungian roots. Strange what completing a dissertation can do—don’t get me started on that.”

  “Remember, MS G-333 clearly states the requisite assistance of an outside technology.”

  “That could mean anything.”

  Lloyd smiled and turned his attention to the stone path.

  “It could mean anything, Eric,” he said, clapping me on the back. “It could.”

  The cabin crouched in a thicket of towering pine, with cedars bursting to every side, and oak and ivy leaves covering the ground. Many of the treetops had been pruned back forming a clearing in the leafy canopy.

  I immediately noticed the array of solar panels mounted on the cabin’s roof, contradicting its otherwise Lincoln Log appearance. Several wind turbine windmills towered to one side, white stalks reaching up through the branches. The solar modules covered the roof from top to bottom, forming an upside down V, leaving room for the chimney.

  “That’s how he powers his lab,” Lloyd remarked.

  We reached the porch and he rapped twice on the door. The cabin’s windows were either filthy or covered from within, because everything was dark. Several steel wind chimes hung on the wood beams. Lloyd was silent, cautious. I wondered if he’d actually been to this place before and if anyone even lived here. Enough had happened to us—the group, that is—to often question Lloyd’s sanity. The verdict always came back an acquittal, but still, the jury was continually out.

  The door cracked open, revealing a strange metallic face. At first glance, I thought it was an animal.

  “Lloyd Martinson and Eric Peters?” it said, voice eerily mimicking the speech-generating device of Stephen Hawking.

  I suddenly recognized it was a fully functioning robot.

  “The two and only,” Lloyd replied.

  “Enter.”

  The robot turned from the door, letting it open; its perfectly paced footfalls boomed on the wooden floor.

  Although I’d never seen anything quite like it (except something similar at our research and engineering department), the robot failed to impress me. I’d made a promise to myself some years back not to allow shiny new technology to cast its spell on me. I was making good on that.

  We entered a room at the rear of the cabin where a high-tech research facility had been set up. Flat computer screens hovered among laboratory equipment and control panels. Various technical gadgetry flourished everywhere like mechanical flora. It might as well have been NASA mission control as far as I could tell; I was a whiz in the library, and when it came to Internet research, but toss me in the lab and I became a deaf-mute.

  I did spend lots of time in the university lab with Lloyd discussing transhumanism and MS G-333, so I recognized the spectral analyzers, whose displays were tracking green frequency rates and other data, as well as the pair of electron microscopes. They sat on a metal desk beside the lab’s most impressive feature, at least that I could identify, a scanning tunneling microscope that resembled a metallic octopus.

  “Must’ve cost a fortune,” I said.

  Lloyd glared from the corner of his eye. “You have no idea.”

  Meanwhile, the robot left the lab through a back entrance and transmitted something in its Stephen Hawking voice to someone I couldn’t see. I heard a response from another voice, which sounded like an old blues singer: husky and full of phlegm. The bluesy voice continued and then cried out–” Have a seat, boys!”

  We sat, Lloyd lighting another cigarette as he made a “be cool” signal with his hand. The couch smelled of sweat and stale alcohol. My vision drifted past the computer consoles, tangles of optic wire, microsurgery, and medical equipment to the far wall where a long, ragged red Flag of the German Third Reich hung from the ceiling proudly sporting a backward-turning swastika.

  “What the hell?” The flag had taken my breath away.

  “Quiet!” Lloyd snapped.

  The robot reappeared from the back doorway, lumbering over the floor toward us, shiny face and computer-generated eyes regarding us dispassionately. It moved to the largest metal desk and powered down, its neck-head coming to rest on its shoulders.

  Its master—that’s how I thought of him—followed, shuffling into the room with a chorus of grunts and swears. He struggled to a leather chair, ignoring us completely and using numerous objects en route to support his obese form until he collapsed into the seat.

  “Hiya, Lloyd,” he said. He stared up at the largest suspended computer screen, taking hold of the mouse and clicking absently. His stretched-out white lab coat was stained with patches of sweat, and his Boston Red Sox cap displayed the older team logo—a pair of slanted red socks with no baseball behind them.

  “Hello, Glix.”

  “This your friend Eric Peters? The mystic guy?”

  Lloyd nodded.

  “I teach poetry,” I added.

  Lloyd shot me a look that conveyed just how uncomfortable he was feeling. I still wasn’t clear about our reason for coming here, but whatever it was, it had Lloyd’s panties in a bundle.

  “Eric is our group’s second-in-command, you could say. He’s viewed MS G-333 as much as anyone and he’s capable of intellectualizing the concepts better than most.”

  The obese man—Glix—gave a chuckle. “Such a funny name, MS G-333,” he said. Then he met my eyes for the first time. Cool and blue: intelligent—yet firm. With the backdrop of the Nazi Flag, he could have passed for a retired German general.

  “Know what I call it?” he said, holding my attention, smiling now. “The Gospel of the Ascended Machines.” His eyes flicked to Lloyd. “Doesn’t that have a ring to it? Doesn’t it sound compelling?”

  I looked at Lloyd, who was nodding.

  The robot retrieved two chairs and the three of us gathered at Glix’s desk before the many computer monitors hovering from metallic arms. The screens displayed everything from email to complex line graphs, from statistics to arrays of frequency readings.

  On the central screen Glix had opened a scanned PDF of the MS G-333 document. The original copy, he said, he was obliged to keep secret. In essence, it seemed identical to Lloyd’s version of the text.

  “I have to ask,” I said, pointing to the Nazi flag. “What’s that about?”

  Glix—whose name was a cover undoubtedly, something like an avatar—chuckled and said, “It’s not what you think. It’s actually a reminder of how these things can go wrong. The ascended machines in their infinite wisdom sent it to me in the mail from the future! And then they sent an email explaining why. I still have the packaging.”

  He rummaged through drawers until he found a sleek silver case, what looked like alloy. When he handed it to me, I found it to be some unusual cloth substance. The address on the front read somewhere in New Jersey, there was no return address, and the postage stamp was about the only thing familiar.

  “From the future!” Glix exclaimed. “Isn’t that something? I don’t suspect they have use of a mailing system in their time. This was an attempt to mimic a custom of ours. Technological telepathy, unimpeded by time and space, is how they communicate with each other.”

  I handed the packaging to Lloyd, feeling a light invisible residue on my fingertips. Lloyd took the fabric but said nothing. I asked, “Why would they send you a Nazi flag?”

  Glix lifted a corner of the flag from the wall. “Go on, touch it.”

  “I already told you, that thing gives me the creeps,” Lloyd said.

  I took up the flap and considered it before letting it drop. Everything it stood for—all its history and violence—hit me in a crashing wave, and sent shivers up my spine, piquing my own anger and memories of Kate.

  “In their email they said the flag’s the real thing—fr
om about the late 1930s—that it once hung in Wewelsburg castle.”

  “Jesus, that is creepy,” I said.

  Glix went on. “The AMs—the ascended machines—claimed to have sent it to me as a reminder, with instructions that I was to hang it in my laboratory, and as I completed the work and carried out the specific operations of the AM Gospel—what you call MS G-333—I was to meditate on it. The eschaton may be written in stone, but the future isn’t, and there are infinite possible evolutionary courses by which we could get there—some much bloodier than others. When playing with fire, it’s important to remember the oven—the Auschwitz ovens, you could say.”

  My skin crawled.

  “In other words, use power for good,” Lloyd summarized.

  “Precisely.”

  The little robot poured us each two fingers of Glenmorangie single malt scotch whiskey before resuming its former position by the wall.

  I’d cut back on drinking while I was married to Kate. She disapproved of my habit—which had swelled to a full-fledged religion during my grad school years—mainly because it turned me into a raging jerk. I usually kept my emotions contained, but under the influence of alcohol the wall I displayed to the outer world came crumbling down; then out poured bitterness and resentment, which I possessed aplenty.

  There were also health concerns. Kate, the psychologist and technically working in medicine (at least by her estimation), was highly conscious of the negative effects of alcohol. And so I had limited my consumption. But since the divorce six months ago the old habit had reared its ugly head.

  I gulped the Glenmorangie with gusto.

  “Good?” Glix said.

  “Actually, it tastes horrible.”

  “Here here!” Lloyd exclaimed.

  “–Horribly good,” I amended.

  Glix laughed, sipping his glass. His large gut trembled and he coughed violently before sipping a second time. Kate’s words, ghostlike, swam through my head: Heavy drinking causes fat buildup in the liver. Excessive fat makes it difficult for the liver to operate and leaves it open to dangerous inflammations.