New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  “How? Even if we manage to get it, we’ll never escape with it. We have no idea where we are. We might not even be on Melville Island anymore.”

  “We have to try. Maybe Gauthier has already come back and is waiting for us at the landing strip. What else can we do? End up like Doctor Hanson and bleed out in the snow? Or worse, like Isaacs, torn to pieces?”

  “We should escape.”

  “And what then?” Wendell whispered. “Die in the snow, waiting for them to find us?”

  Dogan paled.

  “Did you—did you see that?”

  Wendell looked up. The five dark men sat mesmerized before their dead idol.

  “It moved,” Dogan said. “Did you see it move?”

  “It can’t move. Whatever that thing is, it’s dead.”

  “It’s not dead—look, it moved again.”

  Wendell looked closer at Dogan’s face and saw the swelling and the subtle distortion. There was no longer time to gather strength. Whatever they fed him, Dogan had eaten more than he thought. It was transforming him. Wendell did not want to suffer the same fate.

  “Stay here,” he said, though when he looked over he wasn’t certain he’d been heard. Dogan appeared fascinated by what was trapped in the ice.

  Wendell lowered himself onto his stomach and crawled toward Dr. Hanson, keeping an eye on the gathering of disciples ahead. He moved elbow-to-knee as slowly as he dared, not willing to risk being seen. The half-men were feral, and as smart as they were, they were still animals, waiting to attack anything that moved. Wendell had only one chance to get the satellite phone and figure out a way of escaping from the nightmare he and Dogan found themselves in. His hunger had not abated, but enough strength had returned that he was able to make it to Dr. Hanson’s body in under ten minutes.

  The tribe of half-men had not moved from around their dead idol. They bounced on their haunches, made noises like wild animals, followed imaginary movement before them with precision. What was strange, however, was that each reacted differently to what it saw, as though they did not share the same sight. One stood while another howled, the rest looking in different directions. Wendell couldn’t make sense of it, and reminded himself not to try. He had to focus on that satellite phone and getting back.

  He searched the body, doing his best to forget who it had been. Dr. Hanson’s face had been removed—the pale flesh frozen, tiny blood icicles reaching from the pulpy mess to the ground. Wendell turned to keep from panicking and checked the pockets of Hanson’s coat and everywhere he could reach for the satellite phone. But it wasn’t there. Wendell rolled on his side and tried unsuccessfully to flag Dogan for help. Dogan was staring straight ahead at the impossible giant embedded in the ice, eyes open wide and spread far apart.

  Dr. Hanson’s pack was ripped open in the blood-soaked snow, the items within trapped in sticky ice. Wendell heard a loud creak and froze. In his mind’s eye he saw himself spotted, then swarmed by ugly bodies and ripped limb from limb. But when he raised his head he found nothing had changed. The five men remained bent in supplication. Almost by accident Wendell spotted the leather pouch Gauthier had given Dr. Hanson pinned beneath the doctor’s torso. Wendell managed to pry it free of the ice, then put it into his own pocket and gently eased his way back the distance to Dogan. Or what was left of Dogan.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” Wendell whispered, but Dogan didn’t respond. Wendell grabbed his wrist and tried yanking, but Dogan had become a dead-weight, staring beatifically ahead, his face transformed. Mouth agape, eyes spread apart, staring at the dead thing as though it were alive, Dogan was unblinking as tears streamed down his sweating face. Dogan, Wendell’s enemy, Wendell’s friend, was gone.

  There would be time for grief later. Wendell reached over and put his hand on Dogan’s shoulder. “Stay strong. I’ll be back as soon as I can with help.” Then he attempted to stand and discovered he wasn’t able to do so. His legs had given up for good, buckling as Wendell put weight on them. He tried again and again, desperate to escape before it was too late, but he couldn’t get up. After a few minutes, Wendell felt the sensation in his hands going, too, his control slipping away. Everything he saw took on a hazy glow, the edges of his vision crystalizing. The sky jittered, as did the snow.

  Dogan wasn’t the only one who’d had his unconscious hunger overfed with flesh. It was no wonder they had been left unbound at the edge of the camp and ignored. The creatures had no worry. All the damage had long been done. They simply needed to wait.

  Wendell scrambled the small leather bag he had taken from Dr. Hanson’s body out of his pocket. He prayed the satellite phone would be unharmed, that Gauthier had already returned and was waiting for them. If Wendell could only call him, it might not be too late for rescue. He could still escape the horrible things he was witnessing. That creature in the ice—Wendell thought he saw it move, thought he saw one of its giant milky eyes blink, even though so much of its flesh had already been stripped. It blinked, and the coils that sprouted free from the ice twitched and rolled, and a scream built inside him. But when it escaped it wasn’t a scream at all but laughter. Laughter and joy. That terrified Wendell further, the joy, because it finally turned the five beasts his way. They rolled onto their haunches, staring at Wendell and his catatonic friend.

  Wendell took off his glove and reached into the bag slowly to remove the phone, but what he found there was nothing of the sort. It was another kind of escape, the one thing a man like Gauthier would hand over when he was suggesting that someone protect himself. From out of the leather bag Wendell withdrew a handgun, and even in the cold wind he could smell the oiled metal.

  Those five men looking agitated and more bestial than ever before. They snarled, while behind them a giant that Wendell refused to believe was alive illuminated like the sun pinned above. It filled the horizon with streaks of light, tendrils dancing from the old one’s gargantuan head. It looked at the five half-men radiating in the glow. It looked at Dogan, kneeling and waiting for it to speak to him. Then it looked at Wendell and all Wendell’s hunger was satiated; he was at one with everything.

  But he knew it was a lie. It was the end of things, no matter what the disembodied voices told him. The five shrunken men approaching him stealthily on all fours would not return him to civilization, would not return him to health. Dogan and he would be something more to them—sustenance in the cold harshness of the Arctic, pieces of flesh chewed and swallowed, digits shorn until they rained on the snow. These things were much like Wendell, in a way. Much like everyone. They struggled to unearth what they worshipped most, something from a world long ago gone, and if remembered, then only barely and as a fantasy. But it was far more real than Wendell had ever wished.

  Those subhuman things were closing in, and there was little else Wendell could do but surrender to them, let them take him away.

  Or he could use Gauthier’s gun.

  He lifted the weapon and squeezed the trigger. The half-men scattered, but not before he put two of them down. The alien’s appendages flailed madly, and waves of emotion and nausea washed over Wendell. He couldn’t stand, but was eventually able to hit the remaining three as they scrambled for cover. It took no time at all for him to be the last man alive, surrounded by the blood and gore of everyone he knew. Everyone but the mesmerized Dogan.

  It was too late for either of them. Even with the half-men dead, Wendell could feel the draw of the flickering creature in the ice, and knew he would be unable to resist much longer. In an act of charity and compassion, he raised the gun to Dogan’s temple and squeezed the trigger. There was a bright flash, and a report that continued to echo over the landscape longer than in his ears. Dogan crumpled, the side of his head vaporized, his misery tangible in the air.

  But it was not enough. That thing in the ice, it needed him, needed somebody’s worship on which to feed, and as long as Wendell was alive it would not die.

  Wendell put the gun against his own head, the hot barrel searing his flesh,
but he could do nothing else. His fingers would not move, locked into place from fear or exhaustion or self-preservation. Or whatever it was that had been fed to him, pulling the flesh on his face tighter. Somehow the handgun fell from his weakened grasp, dropping onto the icy snow and sinking. He reached to reclaim it and toppled forward, collapsing in a heap that left him staring into those giant old milky eyes.

  Wendell didn’t know how long he lay in the snow. He was no longer cold, was no longer hungry. He felt safe, as though he might sleep forever. The old one in the ice spoke to him, telling him things about the island’s eonic history, and he listened and watched and waited. Existence moved so slowly Wendell saw the sun finally creep across the sky. No one came for him. No one came to interrupt his communion with the dead god. All he had was what was forever in its milky white stare, while it ate the flesh and muscle and sinew of his body, transforming him into the first of its new earthly congregation.

  This is no common case—it is a madness out of time and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with.

  The Case of Charles Dexter Ward . H. P. Lovecraft (1941)

  THE WRECK OF THE CHARLES DEXTER WARD

  Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

  Part One

  Six weeks into her involuntary tenure on Faraday Station, Cynthia Feuerwerker needed a job. She could no longer afford to be choosy about it, either; her oxygen tax was due, and you didn’t have to be a medical doctor to understand the difficulties inherent in trying to breathe vacuum.

  You didn’t have to be, but Cynthia was one. Or had been, until the allegations of malpractice and unlicensed experimentation began to catch up with her. As they had done, here at Faraday, six weeks ago. She supposed she was lucky that the crew of the boojum-ship Richard Trevithick had decided to put her off here, rather than just feeding her to their vessel—but she was having a hard time feeling the gratitude. For one thing, her medical skills had saved both the ship and several members of his crew in the wake of a pirate attack. For another, they’d confiscated her medical supplies before dumping her, and made sure the whole of the station knew the charges against her.

  Which was a death sentence too, and a slower one than going down the throat of a boojum along with the rest of the trash.

  So it was cold desperation that had driven Cynthia here, to the sharp side of this steel desk in a rented station office, staring into the face of a bald old Arkhamer whose jowls quivered with every word he spoke. His skin was so dark she could just about make out the patterns of tattoos against the pigment, black on black-brown.

  “Your past doesn’t bother me, Doctor Feuerwerker,” he said. His sleeves were too short for his arms, so five centimeters of fleshy wrist protruded when he gestured. “I’ll be very plain with you. We have need of your skills, and there is no guarantee any of us will be returning from the task we need them for.”

  Cynthia folded her hands over her knee. She had dropped a few credits on a public shower and a paper suit before the interview, but anybody could look at her haggard face and the bruises on her elbows and tell she’d been sleeping in maintenance corridors.

  “You mentioned this was a salvage mission. I understand there may be competition. Pirates. Other dangers.”

  “No to mention the social danger of taking up with an Arkhamer vessel.”

  “If I stay here, I face the social danger of an airlock. I am a good doctor, Professor Wandrei. I wasn’t stripped of my license for any harm to a patient.”

  “No-oo,” he agreed, drawing it out. She knew he must have her C.V. in his heads-up display. “But rather for seeking after forbidden knowledge.”

  She shrugged and gestured around the rented office. “Galileo and Derleth and Chen sought forbidden knowledge, too. That got us this far.” Onto a creaky, leaky, Saturn-orbit station that stank of ammonia despite exterminators working double shifts to keep the toves down. She watched his eyes and decided to take a risk. “An Arkhamer Professor ought to be sympathetic to that.”

  Wandrei’s lips were probably lush once, but years and exposure to the radiation that pierced inadequately shielded steelships had left them lined and dry. Despite that, and the jowls, and the droop of his eyelids, his homely face could still rearrange itself beautifully around a smile.

  Cynthia waited long enough to be sure he wouldn’t speak before adding, “You know I don’t have any equipment.”

  “We have some supplies. And the vessel we’re going to salvage is an ambulance ship, the Charles Dexter Ward. You should be able to procure everything you need aboard it. In my position as a senior officer of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, I am prepared to offer you a full share of the realizations from the salvage expedition, as well as first claim on any medical goods or technology.”

  Suspicion tickled Cynthia’s neck. “What else do you expect to find aboard an ambulance, Professor?”

  “Data,” he said. “Research. The Jarmulowicz Astronomica is an archive ship.”

  Next dicey question: “What happened to your ship’s surgeon?”

  “Aneurysm,” he said. “She was terribly young, but it took her so fast—there was nothing anyone could do. She’d just risen from apprentice, and hadn’t yet taken one of her own. We’ll get another from a sister ship eventually—but there’s not another Arkhamer vessel at Faraday now, or within three days’ travel, and we’ll lose the salvage if we don’t act immediately.”

  “How many shares in total?” A full share sounded good—until you found out the salvage rights were divided ten thousand ways.

  “A full share is one percent,” he said.

  No self-discipline in space could have kept Cynthia from rocking back in her chair—and self-discipline had never been her strong point. It was too much. This was a trap.

  Even just one percent of the scrap rights of a ship like that would be enough to live on frugally for the rest of her days. With her pick of drugs and equipment—

  This was a trap.

  And a chance to practice medicine again. A chance to read the medical files of an Arkhamer archive ship.

  She had thirteen hours to find a better offer, by the letter of the law. Then it was the Big Nothing, the breathsucker, and her eyes freezing in their tears. And there wasn’t a better offer, or she wouldn’t have been here in the first place.

  “I’ll come.”

  Wandrei gave her another of his beatific smiles. He slid a tablet across the rented desk. Cynthia pressed her thumb against it. A prick and a buzz, and her blood and print sealed the contract. “Get your things. You can meet us at Dock Six in thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll come now,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “One more thing—”

  That creak as he stood was the spring of the trap’s jaw slamming shut. Cynthia had heard the like before. She sat and waited, prim and stiff.

  “The Charles Dexter Ward ?”

  She nodded.

  “It was a liveship.” He might have interpreted her silence as misunderstanding. “A boojum, I mean.”

  “An ambulance ship and a liveship? We’re all going to die,” Cynthia said.

  Wandrei smiled, standing, light on his feet in the partial gravity. “Everybody dies,” he said. “Better to die in knowledge than in ignorance.”

  The sleek busy tug Veronica Lodge hauled the cumbersome, centuries-accreted monstrosity that was the Jarmulowicz Astronomica out of Saturn’s gravity well. Cynthia stood at one of the Arkhamer ship’s tiny fish-eye observation ports watching the vast misty curve of the pink-gray world beneath, hazy and serene, turning in the shadows of her moons and rings. Another steelship was putting off from Faraday Station simultaneously. She was much smaller and newer and cleaner than the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, which in turn was dwarfed by the boojums who flashed bioluminescent messages at each other around Saturn’s moons. The steelship looked like it was headed in-system, and for a moment, Cynthia wished she were on board, even knowing what would be wa
iting for her. The Richard Trevithick had not been her first disaster.

  She could not say, though, that she had been lured on board the Jarmulowicz Astronomica under false pretenses. The ship’s crew of scholars and their families badly needed a doctor. Uncharitably, Cynthia suspected that they needed specifically a non-Arkhamer doctor, who would keep her mind on her patients.

  The lost doctor—Martha Patterson Snead had been her name, for she had come to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica from the Snead Mathematica—might have been a genius, but as the Jarmulowicz Astronomica said goodbye to the Veronica Lodge and started on her stately way toward the Charles Dexter Ward, Cynthia found herself treating a great number of chronic vitamin deficiencies and other things that a non-genius but conscientious doctor should have been able to keep on top of.

  Cynthia’s patients were very polite and very grateful, but she couldn’t help being aware that they would have preferred a genius who let them die of scurvy.

  Other than nutritional deficiencies, the various cancers of space, and prenatal care, the most common reason for Cynthia to see patients were the minor emergencies and industrial accidents inevitably suffered in lives spent aboard a geriatric steelship requiring constant maintenance and repair. She treated smashed fingers, sprained wrists, and quite a few minor decompression injuries. She was splinting the ankle of a steamfitter’s apprentice and undergraduate gas-giant meteorologist—many Arkhamers seemed to have two roles, one relating to ship’s maintenance and one relating to academic research—when the young man frowned at her and said, “You aren’t what I expected.”

  She’d forgotten his name. She glanced at the chart; he was Jaime MacReady Burlingame, traded from the Burlingame Astrophysica Terce. He had about twenty Terran years and a shock of orange hair that would not lie down, nor observe anything resembling a part. “Because I’m not an Arkhamer?” she asked, probing the wrist joint to be sure it really was a sprain and not a cracked bone.