‘No. It means we go back to our real jobs. No more desks. No more mememos. We could go out ravening again. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had a good raven in years, and if doing what she wants means there’s even a chance that we can go back to handing out blood and gore and horrid, horrid death, then I, for one, am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.‘ With which, having said her say, she returned her attention to her beer, though it would have been better if she had applied the her glass to the right mouth, because all she succeeded in doing was throwing the remainder of her pint at Cthulhu.
Now, normally Cthulhu would have objected to people throwing beer at him, because, as far as he was concerned, wet stuff was for drinking and not, as he had pointed out to Jackson Pollock with some force just before he ate him, for throwing at things, not to mention the fact that he had always been, at least as giant green squid-things go, a natty dresser, and beer-stains don’t come out very easily. But Shub Niggurath’s remarkable statement had struck home and his mind was ablaze with possibilities. A return to the good old days of eating poets for breakfast, instead of having to spend his days processing the interminable stream of requests for live goods export licenses emanating from the Fungi base on Earth. In fact he could finally fulfill his fantasy of sending a couple of Shoggoths to finish the blasted things off for good without any fear of receiving an official reprimand from higher management, because higher management would be . . . At which point his brain fused and his enthusiasm level dropped to zero. For he had seen the fly in the ointment, the spanner in the works, the Elder Thing in the ice-tray. Because higher management would be . . . So, quickly, before anyone did anything rash like summoning Nyarlathotep and giving him notice to quit, he turned to his fellow Great Old Ones and said,
‘Er, let’s not get too hasty shall we?’
‘Why not?’ said Dagon, whose face betrayed the very serious possibility that for the first time in several thousand years he might actually consider smiling at some point in the not so distant future.
‘Because, well, yes, we wouldn’t be working for the current lot. But think who we would be working for.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be bloody Nyarlathotep with his memos and his metrics. It’d be somebody more . . . somebody more . . . oh shit.’ The smile was now definitely off the agenda for at least the next aeon. Cthulhu nodded dolefully and said,
‘Exactly. Now who’s going to tell her?’ The her in question being Shub Niggurath, who, having managed to get hold of a fresh pint, was making a spirited attempt on ‘Happy days are here again’, which would have been perfect if only it hadn’t been the case that she had a lousy memory and she couldn’t sing, while, between lines, taking bites from what, on careful inspection, Cthulhu managed to identify as the picture of the landlord’s Deep One mother which had, until now, done its bit to give the bar one of those little touches of loathesomeness that go to make a place home. Well, she may have been a Great Old One, but she was still a goat. Cthulhu and Dagon looked at one another, each making as clear as he could, by sight but not sound, that it's not a job to which I'm well suited, while you, well, you're well known for your people skills (Dagon to unknowingly bereaved mother: ‘At 1237 today your son was tasked to take an urgent memo to Great Cthulhu. At 1239 Great Cthulhu mistook him for his lunch. Next!’. Cthulhu’s standard way of dealing with people and their little personal problems: eat them). And who knows how long the stalemate might have continued, or whether it might have escalated into the ritual exchange of ‘I think you ought to do it,’ ‘No, I think you’d make a much better job of it than me' ‘Oh really, well I’ve always admired the way you handle difficult situations’ and so on and so forth, for, before the two had got beyond the first round of looking shiftily at one another, a lambent voice flowed over and around them, saying,
‘I shall tell her, but spare her, and you, from sadness,’ in tones of such authority and beauty and serenity and certainty that Cthulhu hurriedly looked about, just in case one of the Elder Gods had chosen this moment to drop in from the seventh dimension, or wherever it was they hung out nowadays. There was no Elder God. There was what he must remember was not a snack, but Nina’s young man, and his daughter, looking, he felt, ineffably smug. She opened her mouth and that golden voice rolled out, ‘Shub Niggurath.‘ Shub Niggurath stopped singing, which, it had to be said, was a relief, and looked suspiciously into her glass, as if suspecting that the drink was, as usual, talking, but, for once, doing it without requiring her to mediate its message. ‘Shub Niggurath, put the glass down and look at me.’ Shub Niggurath, now looking seriously worried, slowly turned round and, on seeing Unity, let out a little bleat of terror. And Cthulhu didn’t blame her. He wasn’t sure what was more frightening: his daughter in her usual querulous sexual predator mode, or this strange new version, whose voice, rather than grating, was a thing of beauty, whose face glowed, and whose form - even the unnaturally curved bits - appeared suffused with a supramundane beauty. It was almost, he thought, as if she had already made some connection with the ground of the unity and was changing from woman to goddess. Which was really rather scary, because though being the father of the God In Charge would undoubtedly be something to brag to the boys about, the downside was that having your daughter as God In Charge meant that said God would know all your little foibles and dirty secrets, and be ruthless in exploiting said knowledge in order to bend you to her will. Which Unity had been pretty good at even before her apparent apotheosis. Well, he would just have to put up with it and hope that Unity’s personality did not change sufficiently under the influence of Godhead that she suddenly developed an interest in quantifying the performance of her, what was that word Nyarlathotep insisted on using? Ah yes, resources. Bleh.
Which was, oddly enough, pretty much the noise that Shub Niggurath, immobilised by fear and unable to do more than quiver as Unity approached her, had just made. Unity smiled in a way that should have been insufferable, but now seemed like a divine blessing and, said scarcely seemed an adequate word for the gift from heaven that her voice had become, but it would have to do,
‘Come, Shub Niggurath, what can I do to harm you?‘ With that the goat with at least a thousand young found her voice and said,
‘Do? What can you do? You know what you can do. You can do those . . . those things,’ she pointed, throwing some more beer at Cthulhu in the process, ‘At me, that’s what you can do. What could be worse than that? Where’s my beer? What happened to my beer?’ Under normal circumstances, Cthulhu would probably have responded by waxing sarcastic about beer being the new black (he and Dagon had a lot in common), but these were not normal circumstances. Unity’s smile took on a slight hint of amusement of a form that Cthulhu thought he recognised, but could not place, and then, with horror, realised that it was the amusement he had always felt when observing the doings of mere mortals. If Shub, and by extension himself and Dagon, were as mere mortals to Unity, then he might just as well go and find a carving knife and get it over with. But Unity spoke again,
‘Oh Shub Niggurath, how pitiable you are to think that my womanly body is the worst threat you could face.’
‘Well how much worse could it get?’ said Shub Niggurath, reasonably enough, given that she clearly had not yet registered that this was a new, frightening, and frightening in a whole new way, Unity she was talking to. Unity’s amusement became more evident as she said,
‘Why, I could unmake you. And not just now, but now and forever in future and past. If I will it there never will have been a goat of the woods, your people the Fungi will never have been, and none will know your name.’ Cthulhu was about to ask whether perhaps, as a special request to please her father, Unity was prepared to carry out the Fungi related aspects of her threat, when Shub Niggurath, whose drunkenness clearly knew no bounds, said,
‘Well, yes, that would be pretty bad, but still not as bad as . . . that,’ pointing vaguely at Unity, who now began to show signs of impatience.
‘What is it
that you find so frightening about my body. See, am I not beautiful?’ with which she shrugged herself out of her dress, which fell to the floor, leaving her every flawless feature open to inspection to the Great Old Ones, who reacted in the only way they knew how: Shub Niggurath let out a high-pitched wail and fell off her chair in a tangle of legs; Dagon, his inner fish coming to the fore, dived for cover under a table; and Great Cthulhu, who was sure he had read somewhere that looking at naked women made you go blind, wrapped his tentacles around his face again. Unity laughed and said, ‘You poor frightened things. Perhaps you would prefer me like this.’ There was a mysterious sound and Cthulhu ventured a peek. Where there had been a fleshly abomination there stood a large computer, complete with flashing lights and whirring whizzy things that Cthulhu didn’t even pretend to understand. But even though he didn’t understand it, he knew what this was: it was Nyarlathotep’s Computatron 7000, the evil (even Aleister Crowley thought it was evil, so that’s really saying something) machine into which he fed all his been-counting ‘performance metrics’ and from which he got his ‘delivery targets’. Anything, even having to look at more of Unity than he had ever thought possible, was better than that.
‘No,’ he said hoarsely, ‘Not the Computatron.’ Unity’s voice emerged from the machine and said, with a distinct hint of laughter,
‘I thought not. So how about this?’ and seamlessly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the Computatron became a Shoggoth, had always been a Shoggoth and always would be. But no ordinary Shoggoth, for this one was vast, filling up the space that should have been the bar-room, and more, Cthulhu suddenly realising that they had been transported (together with the bar itself and some of the furniture, to a featureless and, as far as he could see, infinite plane. And he had no idea where it was, which was disturbing, because he had an innate sense of position, which must mean that they were outside of space and time, in the realm of the ground of the unity. So, he and his two friends stood, lay and cowered, dwarfed by this vast Shoggoth, which was itself dwarfed by the emptiness. The Shoggoth spoke, and said, ‘Is this not a fitting form? For I am simultaneously everything and nothing, the creator and the created, the begetter and the begotten, the negation of negation.’
And now, starting quietly, but with growing strength, voices started to sing, first children’s voices, but as they moved on women’s voices high and low and men’s high and low. But great as the swell of sound became, it never drowned the voice of what had been Unity, which now said,
‘And as I am all and none, you are I and I am you, so what more fitting than that I take this form and make you part of me?‘ The Shoggoth reared back, clearly about to do its engulfing thing, and the three Great Old Ones spoke as with a single voice:
‘No!‘ The voice laughed and said,
‘Indeed, maybe not. Then perhaps I should try this form. It is, after all, one well known to you all.‘ The Shoggoth changed and seemed to split up into numerous parts, spheres which seemed both small and immense, finite in number and yet infinite, transparent yet iridescent, stationary but in constant motion. And there before them was the congeries of bubbles that was the physical form of their ultimate Lord.
Dagon emerged from under the table, his mouth wide open, for once out of surprise as opposed to a testament to genetics. He said,
‘If that’s what I think it is, then we are well and truly fucked.’
‘Yes, Dagon,’ said the voice, ‘I am what I am, and no I wouldn’t take you even if you pleaded with me. Oh once I might have done, but I have moved beyond the need for mere physical pleasure now. Can you imagine the ecstacy thrilling through every non-atom of my non-being at the constant recreation of all the universes, all the worlds, all the peoples from instant to instant? No, of course you cannot. That is why you see this form, that you in your little set of dimensions call Yog Sothoth and take to be the form of the unity, the true ground of being. How pitiably naive,’ and though her words might have been, in another place, another time, another voice, contemptuous, instead the three of them felt a divine pity, suffused with love for them. Cthulhu looked at his friends and saw that Dagon was too awed to speak, while Shub Niggurath appeared to be praying (presumably, now that she had actually met God face to face, as it were, to God, i.e. Unity), so it was left to him to ask the obvious question,
‘So what is your true form, Unity’ The voice spoke reflectively, emerging quite naturally from the cloud of shimmering bubbles,
‘Yes, that was the name you called me. But I must leave it behind and now take my true form and name.’ The bubbles stayed still and simultaneously converged together, so standing in their place was Cthulhu’s daughter, still naked, but now of such beauty that it was apparent even to Cthulhu that each part of her, her face, her neck, her shoulders, her arms, her breasts, her waist, her hips, her legs, was beautiful in itself, but that the parts were both perfect in themselves and part of a greater perfection that was Unity. And at the same moment, a passably pretty young woman materialised in the boy-friend’s arms (nobody had been paying any attention to him during the recent events, so we have no record of his reaction to meeting God, let alone to discovering that his girlfriend was God’s sister, but we shall assume that he was mildly surprised) and said,
‘Oh my love, at last I can be yours,’ before forestalling any further debate by kissing him with considerable ferocity. But this was a sideshow. Unity was the main event, now fully human she stood naked but not nude, proud and unashamed, her beauty radiating from her, and said,
‘This is my true form. And it is no coincidence that I chose the name ‘Unity’ for myself, for I truly am the Unity. What seemed like childish pique at the time was in truth the fore-echo of this event. For now that I know that I was destined to become the Unity, I will have always known it, even if I did not know that I knew it.’ She looked around her tolerantly. She looked at Cthulhu, who was trying to work out what she had just said, because he was sure there was a contradiction in there somewhere. And as he thought that, he was not very surprised to hear Unity’s voice in his head saying ‘But I am everything and nothing, being and unbeing. Contradiction is my very essence. It was by comprehending this that I finally transcended my human disguise and became myself.’ So that was him told. ‘But you yourself are a contradiction: the archetypal form of the eater of evil souls who cannot even eat for fear of pain. Be yourself, father. Eat the unworthy. And the worthy too, if they look appetising.’ And the dyspepsia was gone. Cthulhu did not know what to say. His immediate reaction was that now that bloody doctor was going to get what was coming to her, and by the time he had got over his vengeful, vengeful thoughts, Unity had moved on.
She looked at Shub Niggurath, who had stopped praying but still seemed to be somewhat out of it. She did not move but was now in front of the Goat of the Woods. She took one hoof in her hand and guided it so that it rested between her breasts. ‘There,’ she said, ‘That is not so bad, is it Shub Niggurath?’ Shub whimpered and Unity showed brief signs of concern, while the music took a turn into a minor mode. Unity said, ‘What can I do for you? I could show you something much worse. I could abolish beer, make it nothing. Would you like that?’ Well, that woke Shub Niggurath up. With a wild bleat she cried,
‘No, no, anything but that.’ Unity smiled.
‘Very well, beer is saved.’ Shub Niggurath sagged in relief. ‘But you must lose your fear. What is there in my body that you find so truly dreadful? Is it perhaps that in truth you have always desired me but felt the need to pretend otherwise? And in time the pretense became the reality?’ Shub nodded. ‘But there is no shame in desiring me. I am what all things desire, for I am the highest and ultimate goal. My wild, unfocussed rutting came out of the conflict between my being the incarnation of love and the limitations of my mortal form. Now you can find pleasure in me and join in my pure and total love. But you are weak, so first you need rest. Sleep, Shub Niggurath, sleep.‘ And Shub Niggurath slid to the floor, in her first natural slum
ber for many years.
Unity looked at Dagon, who backed away and said,
‘I don’t want anything. I’ll just go and, I’ll, er, go and harvest some plankton shall I?’ Unity smiled and said,
‘Oh Dagon, always on edge, always cynical. I would not change you for the world.’ Dagon let out his breath and said,
‘Well that’s a relief.’
‘Apart from one thing.’
‘Oh.’
‘Your witty come-backs aren’t; your one-liners need several pages of commentary. That makes you only one half of the cynical jester you could be. So now you too will be complete.’ Dagon, without a moment’s hesitation said,
‘That’s a bit rich coming from someone who’s just been bisected. Oh.’ Unity’s smile grew.
‘Yes, Dagon. Do not change.’
And finally, Unity looked at her sister who had once been part of her. Nina had rid herself of all of her clothes and had managed to remove most of her boyfriend’s, and was now indulging in what Unity had no trouble diagnosing as being a formerly favourite activity of hers that, only hours before, Nina would have denounced as being sinful, wicked and definitely not the sort of thing she would ever get involved in. Unity said to herself,
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