The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by Brian Stableford

  Sometimes, though, Oates didn’t sweat. Sometimes, he was cold. In spite of everything, he was sometimes still cold, not only to the touch but within himself. On such occasions, I gave him a cordial to drink, to replenish his energy supplies as well as his liquid balance—something Helen and I had cooked up together. It seemed to help.

  The fact that Oates had made contact with the billion-year-old Antarcticans—them!—and made some kind of pact with them, seemed to me to imply that they were no longer dormant, but that wasn’t the way that Oates saw it. They way he put it was that they were still dormant, or perhaps even dead—but that they were very good at dreaming.

  We’re not, it seems. We’re mere infants by comparison, mere random finger-painters, dream-wise. They can dream while dormant, perhaps even while dead...and their dreams aren’t confined to their physical bodies.

  They do have physical bodies, apparently. Oates was vague, but from what I could gather they’re rather like barrels, with more complex organs at the top and the bottom. They have five...well, call them tentacles for want of a better term, at one end. Oates didn’t know what to call the things at the other end, and didn’t seem impressed when I suggested “the scrapers at the bottom of the barrel,” because he thought of the tentacles as being at the bottom end. I dare say—although Oates didn’t, quite—that they include sense-organs, and maybe a mouth...or maybe not.

  The “barrel-boys,” as I came to think of them were the...not people, not rulers, but...well, let’s just say “dreamers” and leave it at that.

  There were other beings in the Other Antarctica, though: servants, slaves or maybe domestic animals....big, horrid things, swarming with tentacles and shapeshifting like amoebae. Oates had got the impression that they had got out of hand at one point—that they had revolted on their own account or had been co-opted by some enemy. The matter was too vague for him to be sure, though, let alone for him to give me the whole story.

  The way Oates put it, he hadn’t actually met them—the Antarcticans—in the sense that he’d met me or Helen...but he had entered into their dreams. That was what had sustained him, dead or alive. They were dreaming...and still are, of course. That was the trap, the pitfall, the cage....

  Trying to pull the threads together, Oates fell into a bottomless pit, into the collective dream of life-forms unlike ours, who’d been asleep, or maybe dead, for billions of years. Where or when he was it was impossible to say, perhaps because he was no longer anywhere or anywhen, but merely in between. He’d been outside the flow of material events, but not so far outside that he couldn’t look into it occasionally. He could see the Other Antarctica, and he could see fragments of our world too, and occasionally walk therein. The Other Antarctica wasn’t confined to our Antarctica, although it was rooted there. The mystery of how he’s walked to the entrance to the driveway wasn’t really a mystery, even though it was a paradox. He really had walked from Antarctica—directly, in the ultimate instance. He’d been back before, more than once: to London, even to Eton. “Constitutionals,” he called them, although I had a sneaking suspicion that the Antarcticans had elected to carry out reconnaissance and experiments of their own before entrusting him with the seeds and the mission to grow them.

  He could walk back just as easily, of course, if and when they summoned him. They were still watching. They were probably keeping as close a watch on my progress as I was, presumably willing the project to succeed.

  Stranger things happen at sea, they say, but...well, I was about to say that I doubted it, but who am I to doubt, any longer? Who knows what might by lying at the bottom of the sea, dormant but dreaming...waiting...?

  Helen didn’t take kindly to that part of the story.

  “You mean,” she said, “that they could reach out to us at any moment...start dreaming us they way they’re dreaming Oates?”

  “Probably not,” I said, trying to look on the bright side. “If they could do that, they wouldn’t need Oates—and they needed him for something more than mere guidance to our gate. He fell into their trap, remember. I think we’d have to fall into a trap too before they could start dreaming us. And I don’t think there are any traps in Yorkshire. Only in Antarctica.”

  “So if Oates weren’t here, and you weren’t growing his blessed magic beans we’d be safe?”

  Safe? I wanted to say, or rather to scream. Safe! From world war? From the Spanish flu? From everything that the world has in store from us. What the fuck is safe now, for us or for Mercy? How will we ever know safety again, even if we were to find it? But I didn’t. Conduct unbecoming.

  “There’s no evidence that we’re under any kind of threat,” I told her. “They saved Oates’ life. His heart is beating, and he isn’t cold any more, except for the occasional shiver. His leg-wound is scarring over, and his toes haven’t dropped off. Maybe they didn’t bring him back from the dead all at once, but he’s alive now. Sure, they might be giants—probably are—but they might be gentle giants, or at least grateful ones...and Jack got the golden goose anyway, remember?”

  “That was a fairy tale—and a sanitized version.”

  “Nevertheless,” I insisted, “we have no cause for despair, or even dire anxiety. We have no idea what’s going to happen—and that’s a good situation, isn’t it, after so many years of knowing exactly what was going to happen, sooner or later.”

  She conceded that point, as she had to.

  I gave her a hug, for which she was duly grateful, although she wasn’t sure, as yet, that I had come all the way back to life.

  * * * *

  So, the Earth has been inhabited before: before our kind of life—the entire ancestral tree connecting monad to man—emerged from the sea. Perhaps there was an earlier emergence, but Oates’ impression was that the Antarcticans and their enemies hadn’t evolved here. They’d come from elsewhere, as colonists, and once they’d arrived and started up their plantations, as colonists do, they’d become involved in fighting colonial wars, as colonists do. Maybe the entire universe is a battlefield, and Earth is just a remote island, claimed by three or four different powers.

  At any rate, our kind of life is probably the only kind native to the Earth—or maybe not. Oates had no idea, but I couldn’t help philosophizing on the basis of what he told me. I’m a practical agriculturalist, after all; I understand colonialism far better than the poor sods who only had to do it.

  Perhaps the monads that eventually gave rise of humans did emerge by some strange process of chemical evolution from the oceanic slime...it’s possible. But if the Earth had been colonized, a long time ago, isn’t it more likely that the oceans were seeded, like a vast jardin d’acclimation? The essence of the colonial project is feeding the colonists, providing them with an adequate ecological basis.

  The fact that the Antarcticans seemed to be a very different kind of life argued against that, I suppose, but they weren’t the only ones attempting to colonize. Some of their enemies, Oates thought, had been even more different from the monad/man sequence that they were—but some might have been far more like us....and the Antarcticans might, in any case, have had nutritional requirements very different from ours. Hadn’t our chemists, before the war, begun exploring the possibility of “chemical nutrition” that might free us from dependency on our fellow species? Who could tell whether the Antarcticans might not have evolved in a very different way from us....

  Anyway, the basics were clear enough, in principle: the transplantation of crops, the conquest of new environments, the science of assertive botany. Perhaps we—by which I mean every life-form known to us and related to us—are just the end-product of some cosmic jardin d’acclimation, sown in the seas of Earth with a view to...well, to begin with, to a few billon years of adaptive evolution, so that one day the Earth would be ready...that we’d be ready....

  I put it to Oates, in a purely hypothetical manner, that being the best way not to hurt him.

  He agreed that it was possible, hypothetically—even plausible, given
what he knew.

  “They aren’t mayflies, Linny,” he said, pensively. “They don’t work on our kind of timescale. I’d say that they don’t think like us if I thought that there were any other way of thinking but simply thinking, but....well, however they think, and however they dream, they do it in the long term. If Earth is a colony—and it certainly was, even if there’s some doubt as to whether or not it still is—then we could well be part of its crop. Maybe not an intended part, and maybe more pest than product, but part of a scheme. Maybe a useful part, at least for something...and they’ve always known that we’re here, Linny, even though they were only dreaming....”

  I had to take up the story then, as he was treading on thin ice again.

  “Not just the barrel-boys,” I conjectured, “but their competitors, the rival powers. They know we’re here too, and they’re probably capable of dreaming us, in the right circumstances. They could keep us and use us, even when we ought to be dead...even, perhaps, when we are dead...if they could trap us in one of their dream-catchers. Thin pickings in the Antarctic, I suppose, if they need something brainier than penguins—but if there’s an Other Arctic, the creatures hiding there might have had a better harvest, human-wise, with Sir John Franklin and all the people who went to look for him and disappeared in his wake. Is there an Other Arctic?”

  “I don’t know” Oates said. “I never got a glimpse, if there is. You’re right about the Antarctic, though—thank God there’s no reason for glory-hunters like Scott to go back, now than Amundsen’s reached the Pole.”

  “Thank God,” I echoed, automatically

  “I suppose it’s a horrible thought, in a way, that we might just be weeds in an alien plantation that’s run wild while the owners are temporary indisposed,” he said, pensively. “Certainly a blow to human esteem. You always used to say, as I recall, that we could be a good deal prouder of having evolved from a humble monad, by virtue of the marvelous progress we’d made, than we could ever have been of having sprung arbitrarily from the hand of a Creator.”

  “I did,” I confirmed, glad to be reminded of something old and true. “I suppose that your average God-botherer probably wouldn’t be delighted to learn that God is just a barrel with five tentacular feet and a mess of sense-organs at the other end, but...sorry, I’m rambling.”

  “That’s all right,” he assured me. “I do nothing but.”

  Having said that, and having taken a stiff drink, he rambled a bit more.

  “Even if the Other Antarctica isn’t horrible, which it probably is, it’s passing strange. In a way, it’s the old Antarctica—the Antarctica of billions of years ago—but it hasn’t remained unchanged. The Antarctica that they’re dreaming now isn’t the Antarctica of their heyday, even though there are aspects of it that are old and decayed, but not entirely dead.”

  More frustrating vagueness. He couldn’t say that it was really there and he wouldn’t say that it wasn’t not really there, but he knew that it was accessible. It could be dreamed—or you or I could be dreamed within it. All you’d have to do is fall into a bottomless pit.

  “You could do it, I think,” he mused, speaking purely hypothetically, for safety’s sake, “without even knowing you’d done it, if you weren’t on the point of death, expecting the lights to go out any second and forced to be astonished when they stayed on. I don’t think it’s just Antarctica, either, even if there isn’t an Other Arctic. I think there might be Other Africas, Other Australias....”

  “Other Yorkshires?”

  “Perhaps.”

  That was a bit too close for comfort. He shivered; I shivered; we both had a stiff drink.

  As to what the Other Antarctica was like, the one solid adjective I could get out of him was “mountainous.” Except that the mountains weren’t really mountains, any more than they were really cities. They were vast, and strange. The Mountains of Dreams, obviously, but the Mountains of Madness too. That wasn’t by any means implausible. If you’d been dreaming for a billion years, especially if you might have died in the meantime, don’t you think you might have gone a little crazy?

  In my own case, it hadn’t taken nearly as long as that.

  Philosophizing suggested that the business with the seeds, even if it really was a plan, and even if it was a plan by means of which the waddling barrels somehow intended to take over the world, it might be a crazy plan. It might be the result of twisted monomania, or alien schizophrenia, or just plain old derangement. It was a plan of some sort, but that didn’t mean that it was a sane plan, for world conquest or any other purpose. Seeds from the Mountains of Madness. It might be anything, or nothing, maybe even more dangerous for being insane, but maybe far less.

  If we—if I—didn’t try, though, or couldn’t produce anything of interest, Oates would be in deep trouble. Helen and I might be unreachable from beneath the ice, but poor Oates, even though his heart was beating and his wounds were healing, was still stuck in a dream, or a nightmare, and probably subject to arbitrary dissolution at a moment’s notice.

  If they got what they wanted, there was a chance that they might let him off in exchange, honoring the bargain they’d made...if they were honest giants....

  There was a chance, of course that they weren’t and wouldn’t, but there was nothing I could do about that possibility. I just had to play ball and hope.

  I did confess to him that I was afraid, though.

  “I’m afraid, given what you’ve told me, that the dreamers might stop dreaming you,” I told him. “I’m afraid that they’re keeping you suspended in a state just this side of oblivion, and that if anything goes wrong, they might simply let go.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Linny,” he said. “That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  “What are you afraid of?” I asked, warily. I could easily imagine that there might be an abundance of possible fears available to him beyond mere slippage into delayed oblivion.

  He wouldn’t say, so I had to guess. My guess was that he was afraid of what they might dream next. He was afraid of what he might have started, having fallen into their trap—probably the first intelligent creature to have done so for a billion years, unless penguins are a lot smarter than we imagine. He was afraid of what they might do, now that they not only knew that we exist, but also what we are.

  It didn’t matter whether the guess was right or wrong. There was nothing I could do about it. I was pretty sure, though, that it was a horrible thought. We couldn’t hold back the ice, if the ice came again, for all the Yorkshire stubbornness in the world—and we can’t hold back the kinds of dreams that they were dreaming.

  If anything did start moving, we could easily be crushed—ground down to dust—without having any way to fight back at all. If what I was doing now, at their request, were to make any difference in our favor, that would be a miracle—and I didn’t believe in miracles. In that respect, at least, I hadn’t changed at all. I’d been at Mons, and I hadn’t seen a single ghostly archer, let alone an angel. I believed in evolution, in acclimation, in the responsibility of earthly Empire—and even that was an effort, sometimes.

  * * * *

  I had no idea what to expect of the seeds, to begin with—whether they would begin to grow at all, or what kind of development they would produce if they did. One thing, however, was certain from day one, and that was the fact that they were material, and not the stuff of dreams. Perhaps they had been buried under the Antarctic ice for an unimaginable interval of time, perhaps they had somehow fallen into our familiar world from the mysterious “Other Antarctica,” and perhaps they were from another world elsewhere on the cosmic battlefield, but they were made of the same elements as Earthly life, and probably from similar organic compounds, based on chains of carbon atoms. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them put forth shoots and roots, for the shoots to turn into stems, and for the stems to put forth branches.

  Two of them did grow, but not like that. At first, in fa
ct, they didn’t grow up—or, for that matter, down. They grew sideways, putting out limbs of a sort, with a fundamental pentamerous symmetry that made then resemble starfish, at least a little. It was only when I changed the soil in the pots, or switched them to bigger containers, that I could see them clearly, but I did change the soil every couple of days, very carefully, because I was monitoring its content with respect to all the things that Oates had identified as necessary nutrients, and a few extra things besides—and the two that grew certainly seemed to be absorbing materials at a rapid rate.

  I replanted the others too, of course, over and over, giving them every chance, but they weren’t able to take advantage of the opportunities I gave them. If they weren’t dead, they were very dormant indeed, and I couldn’t find the magic kiss that would wake them up, no matter how hard I tried. All my analyses, and all my measurements, seemed to count for nothing. I couldn’t claim any credit for the two that did develop; it was simply a matter of random luck. As to whether the luck was good or bad, time would presumably tell.

  Within a week, I’d figured out that the two that had been resurrected had a prodigious appetite for blood, and that minced meat wasn’t anywhere near as effective as the honest liquid. I had to come to a special arrangement with the local slaughterhouse for daily deliveries. Bovine blood seemed to be a little more effective than sheep’s blood, but there wasn’t much in it. They appreciated extra iron as well, as well as strong doses of magnesium and iodine, but I hadn’t time enough or specimens enough to attempt fine discriminations with respect to other inorganic salts. Common salt, in fact, they didn’t seem to mind at all, although they appreciated extra potassium as well, so I presumed that they had some kind of ion balance to maintain. They did not appreciate manure, or peat. Products of decay were definitely not their thing.