The flurry of incoming information from deployed apparatus and testing devices the IRAs were using was keeping the Miskatonic control team active. Yet, few faces (appearing ill in the green glow cast by the many screens in the mission control room, sleep-deprived and subsisting on coffee, tea, and biscuits) complained.
Fort alone kept the room laughing at his stupid jokes, which were making it impossible for the Dean to filter what Tesla was actually telling him, and on up and down the Sisyphean chain of faeces that invariably rolled downhill...
Ahab had scooted on ahead to 'the anomaly' to sample the soil on the immediate border. A full shift complement, five in number, of Deniston's young astronomers (including the one in a family way, he could never remember her name) were busily doing spectrograph and chromatography read-backs on the results. Other than a change in coloration, and different trace elements here and there, there was no observable variation. So far.
Through their seated, chattering, transcribing ranks, Deniston milled like a delighted father in the waiting room of a Maternity ward. All this new technology was performing well, and holding up. That alone was cause for celebration.
But Dr. Tesla wasn't smiling. He'd slept three hours, his usual, yet still looked agitated, pacing the whole main control room like a wild-haired preacher in a nice but ill-fitting suit.
“Ira...,” he was saying into his own specially modulated audiophone that he carried with him in a small satchel, “How did we call him... Starbuck? Yes, clever. The Starbuck, like the sailor, he is, how you say, built to barest essentials with few luxury features,” here a ghost of a smile flickered through Tesla's eyes like heat-lightning, “He is… more sensitized, you see, to conditions in the environment. He is design to notice details on the ground the others may miss. He is second fail-safe. He is design to be, as we discuss.”
He'd clearly been through this before, not taking very many breaths through the seismograph needle of his neat pencil-line moustache. “And, you see here, for six pages of the ticker-tape, he... it, excuse me, it, says DANGER. DANGER in between every transmission.” The tape itself was in his big rawboned hands.
Then big, harried-looking Ulysses Adams was tapping Tesla on the shoulder to ask him if he could please make some sense out of what was happening on Monitor Fifteen, nothing but random strings of numbers over and over in a permutation that hadn't happened before.
Then it was lunchtime, and when they got back the whole room was clustered around the Relief Assistant left to Camera Four. Stubb’s head-mounted unit. Stubb was approaching the so-called Yellow Zone. The reaction was unanimous, though the Dean was still not in attendance.
:Glowing, glowing without smoke,
from the tiny alcohol heater whose vent-pipe juts out of its faceplate like
a pipe, the bright device that saves its tubes and lights from Outside,
Stubb-4
crests the last low hill between Alphonsus and
Ptolemais, triple-jacketed in steel, cow-catcher
a last addition.
Stubb trundles bravely on.
10-4. ALL WELL SO FAR. GROUP MAY APPROACH, Stubb blips
back in quick Morse-reflex to the other IRAs,
like the leader of a flock
of geese, wheeling them all
into a turn, as though
it is slouching toward
a dinner, and its fellow
mecha-Matroshky
explorers from
Earth, are all no
more than the
rest of the
guest list...
No more than Dinner. As though Earth people
wouldn't throw themselves
from windows,
slit their own
throats, at the
smallest part
of any of this news
that couldn't be
kept under wraps.
The journals of the Imperial Dynasty
of America are yellow, yellow
yellow, in this age. The stain
will out, out
out...
“Oh my Heavens, Deniston, look at the vapors coming off that water. There's no atmosphere. The … the surface of Stubb's … well, carriage, and chassis, for want of a better... He's covered in the stuff! Looks like sulfur, or something. Get everyone in here right now...”
AMEND AMEND AMEND: APPROACH WITH EXTREME CAUTION, STARBUCK FIRST QUEEQUEG SECOND. PROTECT AHAB. PROTECT MISSION. EYES UP. GROUP EYES UP. SCAN IMMEDIATELY.
IMMEDIATELY.
DANGER. DANGER.
: (a wash of static between Earth and Moon, Miskatonic and mecha, captains and crew...)
DANGER.
:On ten of twenty screens,
the yellow waters surge and lap across the Moon.
There is a great disturbance in the Sherlock Expedition,
as though the finest minds Science had to offer
gasped as one, then suddenly began to
bark at the same time.
The new Dean's office door is locked, and dram
of Dutch courage will do little long-term
good, but
He volunteered the lance, to pierce this
infection, tilt this windmill, & now
the real Appropriations meeting
will be reconciled, the true
Final Exam. For their sins,
his, the world...
The whiskey is warm. The office is dark.
The knocks will come.
but
At the yellow-colored sea,
Now stands a monolith, a piece
of monumental architecture worthy
of Stewart's most far-flung theories
on pre-human races, a monolith
which, ipso facto, no known
H.Sapiens Sapiens hands
ever built.
The Dean says Sh'ma, kolenu... in the dark, begins
The wilderness cries out to his ancestors’ God
against the thing on that far shore, the stain
he can't explain away
today...
:I am Stubb. I did not know I was Stubb until
:sentience, sense, the light
from the Yellow Stone
down in there in that yellow water
:monolith, moving gate, wanting to move
more, calling out to the yellow
dust on my skin, my metal
skin.
my skin...
The yellow glimmering coming off the water offers a lantern to the IRA’s data-processing stream. Stubb-4 is moving from the school of verity to another point, one bequeathing traces of incalculable, one the lessons and lexicographers did not fit him with.
Glass-smooth… Still water… Deeps enough to house the immensities of Leviathan.
With his jeweler-cut crystal eyes, Stubb-4 looks for effects. Its metallic foot toes a pebble forward. An inch. And then, as if tugged by an unseen attractor beyond the waterline, a few more.
Ripples come to mind.
Will it?
He, the seeker clutching hopeful dice, takes it up and considers tapping the deep with the small portion of Luna . . .
Measures its weight.
With no oh-ye-ho, casts it, no skim on surface, to navigate.
Unshored. Full sail—
Touches water with no loud. Ripples . . . Ribbed . . . Off to encounter outbound . . . and downward.
Gone.
Is there an unexpected world below, a world exercising its own affairs and complexes of problematic and historical, perhaps a haven of specific perceptions among some unseen population, which will greet it as an invitation, the robot wonders.
And he waits.
Crosstalk IRA-voices chatter in his head and fall silent.
“Stubb-4? Reply. Daggoo-3 please reply. This is Miskatonic Control—”
A distant expression flickers within him. There were spring birds in bushes when he was manufactured, activated; they were laced with odd tones like this, little thi
ngs, wanting, questioning… They were pretty little birds, yellow and black, they fluttered, darted and larked, but he couldn’t grasp the labors of their comments.
Ripples quiet . . . Stillness . . .
“Stubb?’
“Daggoo?”
And from the deeps, without raising a ripple, the unaccountable rises. Twenty cubits wide, three thick. Yellow. Polished-silver radiant.
“A FINELY-WROUGHT… CONSTRUCTION. THE LIGHTS ARE ON.”
Floating bridge, gateway?
A yellow monolith. Without variance or flaw, touched by no mar. Two cubits tall it breaks the surface of the sea. Then, slowly up as if on unseen wings, seven. To a span of forty full cubits. Floating twenty cubits above the glass-flat surface of the sea. Below it, yellow vapor tendrils in a slow ballet of snake-knots. Twining. Seeking some code of inner.
From the monolith one shimmering tendril quietly stretches out . . . Forward to Stubb’s faceplate. Fine particles within the strand glitter and spark, slide along invisible courses . . .
The vividness of sense inundation.
A strange broken waltz, the low frequencies sounding like an old woman weeping in a dead meadow, the high register molten-tones a demonstorm, fills his receptors. “THE FAR CALL… HIS BREATH.” . . . and he begins, puppet-slow, Frankenstein-stiff, to dance. G1 to F3 . . . F3 to E5 . . . tilt . . . and spin . . . around . . . and around—
Daggoo crests the crater’s rim, observes Stubb. “Control, I can now see Stubb.”
Doctor Deniston's voice comes back cold, harsh, metallic and inhuman, “Is he operational? Stubb is not sending, nor has he responded.”
“He is dancing.”
“Dancing?”
“Moving rhythmically. Dancing, muttering, as you can hear, about a new Piper, the tatterdemalion King whose subtle fingers have opened his way to Earth through the Imperial Dynasty of America.”
(At that, there is excited telephonic chatter from the Navy men on the radios in Control, quickly switching to another frequency...)
“Niko, you better come look at this. Stubb is utterly off his teat.”
“What means this teat? Let me see. Where is?”
It took Tesla three seconds to go through the roof. But when he looked back at his good friend, his colleague who designed Miskatonic Planetarium and suffered all Ed Stewart's abuses of it gamely, his gentle mathematician friend with the thick glasses and mop of whitening hair, bugging about the eyes and baring his teeth, panting like a hound, blurted, “The King, the King, Doctor Tesla, you do not understand! He returns!”
Niko's face never changed expression. “People say this for two thousand years! Hold it together, Deniston!” Without a word more, he slapped Professor Deniston broadside.
Deniston recovered his wits.
“What happened, Dr. Tesla?”
“You were babbling the same returning king utterances as the robots.”
“I was what?”
CONTROL: IN HIS PUPPET-DANCE, STUBB-FOUR LUMBERS AS A BESET FRANKENSTEIN. I AM RECEIVING A VERY WEAK TRANSMISSION FROM HIM.
“Daggoo-3, this is Mission Control. We are not receiving transmissions from Stubb-4. What are you receiving? We must know! Transmit what you are receiving from him.”
TRANSMITTING FROM SOURCE NOW.
:NO ROOM!
:NO ROOM!
:O’er the roiling cloud-waves,
RIDE
proud, brave KNIGHTS,
fitted by the yellow armorers
in Carcosa’s fortress-womb
and
scarred under the battlements of villainous, and ever-rebellious,
Alar.
:KNIGHTS-constant,
bearing the terrible and magnificent ram,
Gre Oceol…
:KNIGHTS
wild-whip battle-mass of yellow pennons and sabers gleaming!
:and knight, captains and lieutenants, each astride—
:KNIGHTS
meteor squadrons en masse
—darting out—sudden, swift swoop and blazed with lightning,
ever-present,
flying out like stormlight from an All-seeing sun
:Yellow swords to graze—
yellow lances with portentous appetites, aimed at the insanity of life…RIDING!
RIDING!
The King’s Calvary, jaws set to CATCH,
gallops
from His fort
to the Feeding Season!
:Heads, bitten at His Feast, will roll!
:down and ‘round.
:All fall down!
With no fare thee well…
All the pawns—
:I HEAR THE VOICE!
Mission Control, thick with sweat and splintered anticipating, edgy and the low-toned yammerings of confusion radiating. Deniston and Tesla, listening, watching, staring worryingly at each other, jaws agape. Unhappy.
Deniston: “Can you detect the slightest vestige of sense in any of that?”
Tesla: “As a planter of advanced ideas, I seek and appraise Science and truth, leaving careless gibberish and agitated ramblings to Freud’s gaze and deliberations, or to the judgments of pulpit and press. I am not in the least bit conversant in the rituals, discussion, and foundations of mental incapacity.”
Deniston: “Derangement? In a robot?”
Tesla shrugs. “Corruption.”
—HE WILL BE THERE! HE WILL BE THERE!—
The rightness of the Winter Lantern shines with Carcosa’s eddying clouds of dimness!
It strikes as the blackling bell
and
the keen-compass thrust
of harpooners
:He, triumphant’s higher and higher,
RISEN from the place of the dead roads to the Arch Uppermost,
will cause the scalloped crests of the ninety-three currents of the River of Night’s Dreaming
to flow with roiling fleetness.
:I HEAR THE VOICE!
: All, artists, plow men, sorcerers, learned men and barbers,
will forgo consent when they hear Him beckon…
:The lights are out.
The living and those past the art of burial, each, at the unveiling,
come to accept their role in The King’s play.
THERE ARE NO QUESTIONS . . .
:If you could see the tail of the plow . . .
The Yellow Monolith hovers above the shore. IRA-receivers pick up a monotonous, tuneless piping sound that seems to be everywhere. To this frozen lunar music, Stubb continues to waltz drunkenly back and forth, nearly upending himself several times, then rolling forward in a series of delighted cartwheels as he disassembles the rest of Pip-7, who is still screaming, his anthropomorphic upper body covered in its own patina of yellow dust.
HAIL TO THE KING, Stubb transmits, and then begins pulling the wires from the Tesla Electric Battery in another IRA's back. Niko screams. Camera Four tele-screens go utterly dark.
(Below, moving with the swiftness and efficiency of a robot himself, Dr. Tesla begins pulling out organ-stop switches for what he calls Series Three Security Protocol. But when all the other IRAs begin to approach Stubb, they, too, turn on each other...)
Flask-5 looks at the slowly-pulsing monolith, and bowing slightly, states, “INSTRUCTION RECEIVED. I WILL COMPLETE MY MISSION.” Terrible and swift, the heavy-drill at the end of Flask-5’s lower right arm is a fierce-fanged tiger, boring into the faceplate of Queequeg-2.
Around him is a river of terrible duels.
Dr. Tesla scowls as he keeps attempting to shut down the IRA’s, to no avail. “They do not and will not respond… What has taken them?”
Deniston reflects his scowl and shakes his head in utter disbelief.
Starbuck-6 has taken apart Daggoo-3’s head, and removed many of the silver-dollar-sized gears and wheels, and several levers. He has spread and arranged them around the ground between his legs and is using them as chess pieces. “Ride forth, Knight. The pale Queen awaits!”
Dep
loys knight f1-g3-e2-d4. “Artists, plow men, sorcerers, learned men, bishops and barbers—with a snip-snip here and a snip-snip there—your hare won’t cut it—All and each and every, will forgo consent when they hear Him beckon. THE LAW IS FOR ALL.’
“FOR ALL.” Knocks over two pawns. “Leave none standing, Good knight! Watch your watch!”
A yellowish haze fills his faceplate as he, eyeing the Queen, begins to sing. “Farewell and adieu to you, Sweet Camilla of Carcosa. Farewell and adieu, to thee, Sweet soon-to-be Queen… in far, cold Carcosa.’
“Do you like being this new color, my diadem-crowned, Queen?” And Starbuck-6 laughs…
“Gods and monsters! Starbuck is mad, stark raving—Tesla, how can our constructs hallucinate and become deranged? How in the name of God can that happen?”
“Some thing has rewritten or corrupted their protocols.”
Pointing at the view-screen, Deniston nearly shouts, “I can see that.”
Michael Deniston rubbed his eyes. Headless brought it all back. The beginning, Marcus’ journal, the carnage he saw—
Clacking. Ticking. Hiss and static… Riotous music never charted by any pencil or strings...
~
Irreducible fact. I am Doctor Stephen Marcus. I was appointed Dean of Miskatonic University by vox populi, and I will find out why there is a yellow stain on the Moon.
All these irreducible facts in my journals I thumb through now, marking, dog-earing, circling, annotating. Fact. I just set my coffee on 1899. D--- it. The year we first saw the stain on the Moon.
It is a great thing we have done, pointing this mighty glass phonograph-needle at the Moon. I only wish that the circumstances necessitating it could have been more peaceful, or that we had some real stratagem if matters go truly awry.
We saw the yellow stain first. My school. My university. We must do right by this, and rectify it. We must be at the forefront of Knowledge itself, to give our Commander-in-Chief and his minions in khaki only the ammunition necessary to fix the actual problem...
But I fool no one, save myself.
~
Our own Professor Stewart was the first to note the yellow stain on the Moon. He was teaching several graduate students the methods the Egyptian astronomers used to determine distance over land, a simple demonstration with sticks and stones tromping about in the moonlit fen and bracken which surround our fair campus. Until they saw what they couldn't explain, and he came to roust me out.
Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 3 Rev3 Page 23
