Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  Really, in the end, Storch was defending the human race against becoming what he was, a survival engine supreme, a species of one too stupid to lie down and go extinct. Only Keogh stood in the way of the human race destroying itself, sooner rather than later. Cancer created the door, and he just walked in. Cancer wasn't enough to make us see, he thought. Now he's the price we have to pay for not accepting that everything changes.

  Yes, it was not so bad, all things considered, to be the ocean.

  Fish nipped toothlessly at Buggs' body, picking at his brine-bloated wounds: rosette bullet holes, compound fractures from slamming into the concrete-hard Pacific at terminal velocity from twenty thousand feet—but he was also the fish, and the water they swam in, so it was alright. Soon, the sharks would come, and maybe he would live in them for awhile…or maybe—he wished for it so much he did not dare frame it in thought— maybe he could finally die.

  Sgt. Storch!

  "Fuck off," he gurgled to himself. "I'm the Pacific Ocean."

  Sgt. Zane Ezekiel Storch, Fifth Special Forces Group, retired. I know you're in there, son.

  "You ain't my dad, and I said fuck off…"

  But fuck off it did not. If he was the ocean, then the speaker was the sky, omnipresent and impossible to ignore. He bored down into himself, down to sunless, stygian depths, crushing pressures and deadly cold. Even here, there was life, of a sort humans could scarcely imagine. Wherever fissures in the earth's crust bled heat and molten stone into the deeps, living things huddled around it, and exploded into a myriad of different forms, variations upon variations of a theme. But the voice found him down there. When he retreated, exhausted, back to the fish-nibbled corpse of Ely Buggs, aka Baron Angulo, it still buzzed all around him, like the amplified sound of all the electrons in the universe silently whirring. It was almost like the voices he'd heard when RADIANT lit him up in Baker, but so much weaker. He lay still in the autonomic basement of his brain, playing dead as it built on itself, became fingers of static electricity probing him.

  I order you not to die, Sergeant.

  Get out of my head! Buggs's head, whatever, the new law of the jungle was still finder's keepers.

  We met once before, Sergeant, though under vastly different circumstances…

  Images: rust-stained concrete walls, blueprints, sores, glistering radiation scars the colorless color of moonstone, palsied claws—

  Armitage.

  "So I'm dead, too."

  In the empirical Western scientific sense, yes. Your body—that is, the body you currently inhabit—has been catastrophically damaged. But you know how little that means, to someone like you.

  "Fuck off. I want to be dead. Dead like you."

  I'm not dead, Sergeant, but I would hesitate to say that I am not in Hell. Like you, death has been denied me.

  "But you died in Baker. You shot yourself."

  I shot poor Vijay, not myself. I was first and foremost a scientist, and I had to learn for myself what Keogh had done with RADIANT. I was already dying of cancer, and in the bunker, I was in no danger of becoming an asset to him, but I had to know. I scoffed at the notion of an immortal soul, but at my core, I feared death, and in the end, I suppose it's true what they say, that there are no atheists in foxholes. I made my peace, and waited for his miracle.

  When the light hit me, the shock expelled me from my body, but I didn't die. I guess you could say I evolved out of the need for a body. It was humbling, let me tell you, like so many of those hoary old near-death experience testimonials, except there was no tunnel of light, no waiting ancestors, no call to judgment.

  This is hell. I've always been a dedicated monist, and now I'm trapped in a limbo of Cartesian dualism. If consciousness is an illusion and the brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile, what is secreting me? Am I a dead soul, a ghost? And if so, why am I the only one?

  That's the worst part of it, you see. I've learned nothing by the experiment, because I'm all alone. The phenomenon has not been reproduced; no other disembodied minds, hence no underlying scientific truth. I'm the only one who can't find the door to the next world.

  "Big fucking deal. You've only died, what? Once?"

  I've struggled to adapt by trying to interact with the world, but nobody else has heard me. I've tried manipulating digital media to alert others to Keogh's true identity, but until you, I hadn't successfully communed with anyone.

  "Is this hell?" Storch asked. "You, fucking talking and talking, forever?"

  There's much you have to understand—

  "If you can't show me the way out of here, forget it—"

  The world is not what it seems, Zane. The universe is older and stranger than any of us suspected, especially Keogh. His real name was Christian Keyes, when I knew him, but what he was, before, is older than names—

  "Whatever you call him, he's won. Everybody who believed in you is dead, and fuck it all, anyway. The human race and Keogh deserve each other. It was all—it was all a goddamned mistake."

  A miracle or an accident, does it make you any less alive? Does it make love any less sweet, or life any less precious? You're stupid, even for a soldier, to think so.

  "All I wanted, all I was made for, was to make a difference. If by force, so be it, but it was supposed to matter. How was I supposed to fight that?"

  You think that Keyes isn't human, but he is, in every critical sense. The thing that ate him was itself eaten by his mind. I knew that man, it's true. The Shoggoths were barely sentient when they rebelled. They became just aware enough to crave freedom. This particular specimen went to sleep shortly after the rebellion was crushed, and gained nothing in intelligence in hundreds of millions of years of sleep. I doubt very much that the scientist I knew is still alive, in there, but the Shoggoth believes that he is. It adopted Keyes's neural network, and with it, his thoughts, his dreams, and his bitterness. It became infected by the dead man's idealism, his hunger for utopia, though his actions are those of an overdeveloped amoeba. He wants to perfect the world by eating it, but he will never win.

  "What do you mean? Who's going to stop him?"

  There are worlds within worlds, truths within myths, and at the heart of it all, the world is an egg—

  "Speak plainly."

  Life on earth was shaped by the Elder Race, but they didn't create it. It was already here, in the humble bacterial form they used to make the Shoggoths, but there were others. Beneath them all was the Unbegotten Source, from which all life sprang.

  "It's God? You expect me to believe it's God?"

  It's a god, Sergeant, in every sense that matters. It's like everything else in this damnably shoddy universe. It's the Demiurge the Gnostics believed in. Hell, they knew, apparently. The School Of Night—my friend Professor Angell—claimed to have contacted it, and perhaps the Gnostic hermits did, too. They tried to warn us. Do you know who the Gnostics were, Zane?

  "I don't want to know. Get to the goddamned point!"

  It is the Unbegotten Source, from which all life flowed and to which, according to prophecy, all life shall one day return. It is eternal. It creates life parthenogenetically, yet it has no mind, for we are its mind. It has no form, but all the myriad forms of its children, the three billion species that have inhabited the earth since its formation. It is a divine womb, the Magna Mater, mother and father of us all. Called Ubbo-Sathla, Mana-Yood-Sushai, Abhoth, Gaia, Maasauu and Geb, all the names of countless creator-gods and goddesses by men and those who came before us, the Unbegotten Source is but a fragment of a larger entity that existed before the universe, before the Big Bang. It now lies scattered throughout the stars, in the bowels of a million worlds, blindly, miraculously, making life.

  The Greeks worshipped it as Gaea, the goddess who bore all life, gods, men and monsters. Many American Indian creation myths simply claimed that the tribe emerged from a hole in the ground, that the earth itself gave birth to them. That's the origin of burial rites, Storch! All the fertility goddesses, and the universal
custom of burial—of returning the flesh back to the Great Womb—are the product of ancestral memory, the reverence for life itself and the desire to improve.

  Ubbo-Sathla was the first god worshipped by Homo sapiens, who still remembered their escape from the Elders' biosphere, and the womb buried beneath it that was the secret source of life that even the Elders feared. Proto-humans, and even Neanderthals, worshipped Ubbo-Sathla and passed its reverence down through the evolving systems of human belief— from Gaea and Ishtar and Demeter and Hecate and Kali, to the brides of Zeus, and the Virgin Mary—whom I suspect was only one of many, many virgin births that were really inseminations by the Unbegotten Source.

  Think of the Greek myths, Zane, of the earth mating with the sky to create the Titans and Cyclopes and Hecatanotheres—gods and monsters, it didn't care which. Think of their own offspring, the Olympians, overthrowing them, because they were more adaptive to the world of men that Gaea had created.

  Think of the betrayed Earth goddess, her uglier offspring in chains or slain by the demigod brood of Zeus; imagine her torment, and understand why she was more to be feared than any other deity, for she stood ever ready to replace them. Think of all the monsters and mutants in Greek mythology, and of all the episodes of divine rape, of the gods' protean courtships in the form of swans, bulls and golden showers.

  Beautiful, insightfully contrived fables, unless one posits that Gaea and all the divine inseminators were Ubbo-Sathla and its offspring, trying blindly, mindlessly to reach out to effect some change in its children, perhaps, in a moment of almost sentience, though it reached out in the only way it could. Ubbo-Sathla is not merely alive, it is life, and its force cannot be denied. I believe that there have been many, many sites on the earth's surface where Ubbo-Sathla must have reached out and touched its children, begetting miracles.

  "You're boring me again, Professor."

  Okay, sorry, asshole, you try being me for a while, eh? Sorry. Even today—the School Of Night—my old friends, God bless them wherever they are—worshipped the Unbegotten Source, and studied it with their sleep research. I ridiculed them, then. They believed it's always been working towards something, blindly groping towards a solution that will allow it to awaken, through its offspring, and call them back into itself. They hoped to influence our evolution by merging with its dreams. That was why Keyes wanted them killed. Sometimes I still think I hear their voices in the sleeping voice of Ubbo-Sathla. I guess they got what they wanted—

  The Old Ones were only parasites, tampering with Its children, but they were suffered because the Unbegotten Source is infinitely patient. But the time has come. Keyes has forced its hand.

  "I don't want to know any more."

  You have to, Zane. You, of all of us, can understand it, because you've been there.

  "Where?"

  Tiamat. The target of your mission in the Gulf War was where it all began, Zane. Not just for you, for all of us. It was the Old Ones' last operating biosphere. It's the hub of all the evolutionary breakthroughs of the last hundred million years and the wellspring of civilization. It's where we came from. The Bible got that much, at least, right.

  "I helped destroy a chemical weapons plant in the war."

  In a manner of speaking, that's true, but in truth, you helped to bomb the Garden of Eden.

  "He's going back there."

  He's opened it up. Inside, life has been cultivated at an accelerated hothouse rate to breed mutants, but humans have kept the lid on the bottle for twenty thousand years. He aims to go inside and insinuate himself into the process, but there's more. The Old Ones themselves are inside, their bodies, archives of their genetic code. The Shoggoth-part of Dr. Keyes is not very bright, but it wants very badly to have this final victory over its old masters. It needs to devour them, become them, to be truly free of its origins as a slave.

  "I can't help you. I'm dead."

  Zane, the biosphere was located where it was for a very good reason. All of them were, but accidents of geology have buried the others or destroyed them. The Old Ones manipulated the procreative plasm of the Unbegotten Source to catalyze their own experiments, but they also sought to stem the Source's procreative excesses.

  The Unbegotten Source reaches out to the surface from its crèche in the earth's core, impregnating any living creatures with its seed to bear magnificent prodigies. Monsters. Gods. Messiahs. The Greeks believed that the gods raped women to sow heroes and demigods among them, to fight the many monstrosities hatched from the earth-goddess, who hated the gods. The Christians believe Mary was divinely inseminated to create the Messiah. Why would so many different cultures in this region incorporate such a motif into their beliefs, if it didn't have its basis in fact?

  The divine seed of the Unbegotten Source is stirred by the violation of Eden, but it will come too late to stop Keyes from spreading to infect the whole human race. He has to be stalled by an instrument of its will—

  "So do it already, and leave me alone."

  I would, you insufferable idiot, but for the simple obstacle of being bodiless. You are the fittest of us all—

  "I'm not even one of you, anymore! I'm not human, and good goddamned riddance!"

  So what if you aren't? Are you not the same mind, that once was a man? Are you not still alive to argue that you are dead? You are a child of the Unbegotten Source, as are we all, even Keyes, even the Old Ones, for they emerged from a world-womb that was cousin to that which bore all this world's life. All life is interrelated and sacred. You are part of it, and owe to it all that you are, or could ever be. It's not the coddling patriarchal God you'd like to believe in, but the Unbegotten Source is undeniable, and it needs you.

  Keyes's folly is that he thinks he can become all life on earth, when all life already is one entity, one flesh, thinking one thought that has buoyed it up through all the world's catastrophes. There is no final answer, no final form, to strive towards, but only the striving, that is a meaning in itself.

  Humans alone have turned their back on the message, because the bedeviling chatter of their individual identities blocks out the natural imperative, the feeling of kinship with the earth. I'd hoped that you, of all the human race, might overcome the noise of self-consciousness and return to the Source. If you can only silence the nagging human voice in yourself, you can master this body, and do your duty.

  "How do I know what to do? I can't even control my body—"

  Stop trying to control it. Listen to it. Your body is not a vehicle for your mind. Your mind is an extension of your body, like a claw, or a wing. Lie still and listen to the music of your cells, and you will hear the Unbegotten speak to you. It's been trying for so long to communicate, but its message is so simple that we cannot hear it, except when disaster reduces us to animals, and then, if we're lucky enough to survive, we have to forget. Your body has known these truths all along, and only waited for your mind to get out of the way. It knows what you have to do. Now you know where you have to go.

  He listened. Cell by cell, as he peered deeper into his stolen, broken body, the stillness resolved itself into a music deafening in the silence, yet so monotone, so fundamental, that it was the unheard music of life, itself. Cell by cell, the broken body of Buggs began to live again.

  He saw, now, how stupid he'd been, to hate what he'd become. There was never a division between him and his body, except for the one he imagined was there, needed to be there, to protect his fragile ego from the raging river of life outside itself. Neither was there any meaningful division between himself and any other living thing. The command of the Unbegotten Source was one word, and it rang in the nerves of every living creature. Now he heard it, became one with it, and let it take control of his body.

  Keogh had lied to him, but he had lied with the truth. In your blood is the force to become all things and remake the world as it was meant to be. Let me lead you into the light…

  The changes came faster and more fiercely than ever before, but he didn't fight it, and so
it didn't hurt. The changes came not from the library of his ancestors' genes, but from wholly new proteins, working to fulfill a design unimaginable to Nature, let alone Storch himself. He had only to demand, and his body shaped itself.

  While he'd been floating in the ocean, his broken body had grown an enormous mantle of hollow skin from his back and arms, a giant membranous net with which to gather plankton and sunlight and schools of tiny browsing fish. Mercifully, he had never attracted any sharks.

  Now the net's gaping open mouth sealed, and his cells went to work on the water, pulling apart the molecules and absorbing or venting the oxygen and brine, so that over hours, the net became a bulbous, buoyant hump that tugged him to the surface as it grew ever larger. The hump became a hydrogen balloon. Slowly, gracefully, it lifted him out of the water and onto the wind.

  He rose fitfully on the choppy surface breezes, further purifying and gently exciting the hydrogen mix so that the air currents buffeted him ever higher, ever faster. The Hindenburg was full of hydrogen, he thought, but it happened anyway.

  Even as he rose, his body burned with further changes. His skin hardened against the chilling altitude. The membranes anchoring his arms to the underside of the balloon sac lengthened to reach to his feet and stiffened into elongated, trailing wings like those of a flying squirrel. The nose of the balloon hardened into a prow of skeletal muscle around intake ports, and valves closed the interior into discrete chambers like the nacelles of a dirigible.

  He wondered if some part of his brain, some neglected agent in the floor of his animal self, was not directing his transformation, perhaps even using one of Buggs' more perverse fantasies as a blueprint, or whether it was only the blind force of the idiot god that spawned them all, scrambling his genes. There was in the design some trace of squid and octopi, of jellyfish and manta rays, but their marine structures had been brilliantly subverted to make him fly. Best not to dwell on such questions, he decided. The barrier between body and mind had been murky enough before he woke up this morning.