The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  “And!”

  “My lord, when we checked a few breaths ago, guards discovered.… Well, my lord, they discovered that the habitations seem cluttered with mounds of combustibles. Several thought they saw movement in the deepest shadows within the domiciles, but none of”—it gestured toward the Cwrth with a movement of the tarsi that in any level of polite society would have been…not polite—“none of them were visible.”

  Torq stared. The guard—even though a three—showed imminent signs of curling, so after a moment, Torq relented enough to return to an earlier part of the report.

  “No ord—! No orders from me! But didn’t you think to.…”

  No, they hadn’t thought. The numbers outside were mostly eights. They did not think. They followed orders explicitly. Or died.

  With a gesture suspiciously like drawing a tarsus across a vulnerable ventral plate, Torq dismissed the three.

  He scuttled heavily toward the center of the chamber, where the Cwrth stood silently. She seemed sad, her angles canted slightly earthward, her dorsal surface curved just as slightly in what in a Koleic would have been interpreted as the first signs of curling.

  Yet something in her orbs—those loathsome twin balls of moisture—told him that she was not in fact defeated. She might be sad, although he could not understand why. But she was still not defeated.

  “What has happened? Where are your people?”

  He cursed the delay as the machine translated each sound he had made.

  She spoke, and there was another delay.

  “They are gone. Into the mountains, following trails known only to us. And you”—Torq shuddered at the venom in the word—“you will not destroy this place. We will. It is ours, and we will destroy it, if our God requires our sacrifice.”

  “You will die.…”

  She began that eerie, eldritch twisting of the mouth-flaps even before the trans-comm had begun. It was as if she already understood what Torq would say next and was ready to respond.

  The trans-comm chittered and whistled at her, however; and she chittered and whistled back.

  “Of course I shall die. That is why I am here. I am the least, the”—the trans-comm nearly ground to a halt before spitting out a long sequence of words—“the one-who-sheds-ichor-willingly-in-order-that-all-others-may-survive. I am the distal-appendage/female-that-has-not-yet-given-birth. Through me my people will survive.

  “If my God wills it.”

  “I do not so will,” Torq screamed. “I do not so will! I am your God! And she”—here he gestured toward where the ship had just become visible through the top of the tallest window—“she is my God!”

  The trans-comm struggled but it had not been designed to communicate such intensities of emotion. Gears ground in the effort, and whiffs of smoke appeared around the speaker. The chittering and twittering and musical tones sounded distorted, gravelly and harsh.

  Even before the trans-comm fell silent, he snapped a gesture toward the nearest guard.

  “Order the ship to prepare all force beams. As soon as the lander rises, destroy this place!”

  “My lord, yes!” The three clicked a sharp salute.

  Torq glared at the Cwrth…or rather, at the place where she had stood an instant before. During his outburst, even as the trans-comm had begun translating his command, the Cwrth had silently moved to stand immediately next to the wooden column. One of her hands touched the surface of the hideous carving, caressing it as if it were the most gorgeous thing in existence. The facet stone at her breast shone with its own internal light.

  And she was speaking, whispering in a tone so low that through all of his screaming, Torq had not heard a thing.

  He started to moved closer to her, infusing his bodily stance with all of the subtle signals of hatred for her stubborn, presumptuous species that he could—tarsi fully extended, as if he would rip her body covering from whatever structures supported it; carapace divided just enough to reveal the ichor-green of his wings; mouthparts quivering with suppressed rage; eyen glistening as his compounds flared toward her.

  He almost began to speak.

  Then he stopped.

  There was something about her voice, about the words she was obviously uttering. He concentrated.

  This was not the language she had been speaking to him!

  Her words now contained almost none of the flighty high-pitched twittering, none of the rhythmical whistles that he had become accustomed to hearing and that at times he almost felt he could understand on his own. No, these sounds were harsh, guttural, her mouth-flaps quivering in tight little movements, up-down, up-down, nearly faster than his eyen could follow.

  And she had altered physically.

  The thin stalk that divided her head from her thorax stiffened. Thick ropes of tissue swelled from within, moving up along each side and pulsating as if with a life of their own.

  The twin lumps of flaccid tissue on her thorax—Torq could imagine no possible use for such protrusions—tightened, the cone-shaped tips rising slightly in defiance of even the weak gravity.

  She had spread her two body-supports until they were farther apart than the widest part of her body. In doing so, she had revealed even more of the unsightly swelling just below the tissue-lumps. The covering was visibly tighter, shining and beginning to turn a faint red. The earlier random movements within the swelling had become rhythmical, repetitive, as if a dozen tarsi were probing the tissues from within. He nearly retched at the sight.

  Painfully he brought his eyen up to concentrate on her upper features; what was happening below was horrendous beyond all words.

  She was still caressing the horrible carving, but now her tarsi were flitting so rapidly over the surface of the stone that it seemed as if the stone itself were moving, shrugging pleasurably beneath her touch.

  And her voice dropped even lower, rumbled almost, as it reached depths that would have ripped at a Koleic’s speaking organs with their throbbing, ragged intensity.

  The words became more rapid, running into each other until they became a litany of horror unbroken by breath.

  Torq strained to recognize something—anything—in the confusion of deranged sounds but could not. His first hand dropped to his carapace pouch.

  The monstrous carving seemed to wriggle obscenely beneath the Cwrth’s hands.

  Her swelling expanded, contracted, expanded again, and Torq realized with horror that its movements were somehow connected with—controlled by—the rhythms of her unknowable, unspeakable words.

  His tarsus touched the thin metal rod and began to withdraw it.

  “My lord!”

  The voice of the three—strained and dismayed as it was—calmed Torq for an instant. It was familiar; its rhythms were of his species, within his experience. Then he registered what the three was saying. Screaming.

  “My lord! Something…a…it comes!” And with a final shriek that Torq would have thought beyond the capacity of a Koleic to utter, the three curled!

  Torq glanced back at the Cwrth.

  She had not left her place near the pillar. She was still stroking the stone creature, still muttering in that strange, uncanny tongue.

  He turned and approached the window at the farthest side of the chamber.

  And stopped. Stunned.

  Beyond the distant mountains, a cloudy mass—billowing, roiling, lit from within by preternatural flashes of unnamable hues—a cloudy mass, such as had been charted elsewhere on the planet, descended, grazed shadowed heights, undulating across fields as if it were alive, and hungry, and angry.

  As it approached the buildings of the enclave, it spread murkily, thinning but in the process becoming opaque and—if such a thing were possible—even more threatening as its lower surfaces bubbled and boiled, touching and shattering the thin spires, hiding the horrible angles of building after building.

  The unnamable colors increased, joined with others familiar to Torq’s eyen—red, yellow, bile-green.

  Part of
his mind dissociated instantly. It began dispassionately, and entirely irrationally, to consider the curious modifications in wave lengths as the lights—the colors—filtered through the crystal panes.

  Another part of his mind registered amazement and horror at his objectivity at such a moment.

  This cloud, this…thing…could not possibly exist.

  But it did.

  It approached rapidly.

  And stopped.

  It contracted, compressed itself into a mist, a fog…thick, impenetrable but still motile. It now approached slowly. Frighteningly slowly.

  Within the grey-blue fog—still lit, though less brilliantly—by the flashes of abominable color—lay a central core of absolute blackness that even Torq’s numberless compounds could not penetrate.

  * * * *

  The Cwrth’s voice patterns had changed again. Though the sounds were still those of the strange language—and to Torq it felt immeasurably ancient—they were slower, more distinct.

  They now held notes of command.

  The first wisps of mist settled lower outside the chamber.

  Torq watched with horrified amazement as the tendrils solidified, became tentacle-like, then solid, questing tentacles that stretched and expanded—even though the central core of darkness remained stationary.

  The twisted in and over each other, curled and straightened as if they were feeling their strength for the first time, then dropped.

  In an instant, they had encircled the lander.

  Torq had just time enough to notice that the ground between the building in which he stood and the lander was littered—was covered by a chaos of small black nodules. It took him a breath to figure out what they were.

  His entire squadron had curled.

  Threes, fives, sevens, nines…all drawn tightly into themselves.

  All lost.

  Then, even as the magnitude of the disaster settled into his mind, the grey-now-black-now-midnight-purple clenched. Once. Convulsively.

  And in a monstrous shower of flames and smoke and consumption, the lander was no more.

  * * * *

  Torq pulled the thin metal rod from his pouch as he swiveled away from the window.

  He raised it and pointed it toward the Cwrth.

  And stopped.

  She suddenly seemed to catch fire, to flame and glow, her white dress transformed into a living column of opalescent majesty. Her voice shifted again, grew even more intense, as if before she had only recited but now she saw and knew.

  The trans-comm made a single attempt to begin translating, the statue—just as had the lander—exploded.

  Torq felt hot metal on his carapace, brushed it absently off of his first arms with his second. He felt no pain.

  The Cwrth ceased her…incantations…for a brief moment, long enough to raise both of her hands high above her head and repeat one phrase over and over: Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth!

  With a muffled thud, the drapes that had curtained most of the great chamber fell from their fastenings and lay in muddled heaps on the floor.

  The Crwth seemed transformed, glowing even more brightly as the hidden walls were revealed as windows, wider, larger, infinitely more imposing than those that had before been visible.

  Seven impossibly large windows…onto nothingness!

  Each held within its crystal plane a blackness that exceeded blackness. It seemed palpable; it seemed to shout emptiness and abomination and monstrosity.

  Torq felt his dorsal tissues struggling to curl.

  In the deep blackness, he saw…movement.

  The blackness roiled and writhed and agitated, until from the depths of each window into reaches beyond space and time, infinitesimally tiny tendrils began to form.

  The Cwrth spoke, and even without the now-defunct trans-comm Torq understood that she was speaking his name as it would be pronounced in that ancient, archaic tongue.

  He tore his eyen from the nothingness around him to stare at her.

  She touched the carven image lightly with her appendages…and this time, Torq knew that the hideous thing had in fact moved.

  From beneath its stony body, thin tentacles began to emerge.

  One.

  Two.

  Many.

  Then she directed his eyen upward and outward, toward the distant sky where his ship hung motionless, the sole remaining star in a nighttime of blackness. There were no other lights; no stars. Sunfall was complete but there were no stars.

  And something formed out of the blackness.

  Torq knew without knowing what he was seeing.

  More tentacles, an infinity of tentacles stretching upward and outward until they seemed more elements of sky than of earth, until they twined and twisted and formed an almost impervious net over the world.

  Then, in an instant, one of them dropped slightly, looped itself several times around the single source of light in the eternal calignosity that lay beyond Torq’s universe, tightened, and the ship—and everything within it—disappeared.

  “My God!” he screamed.

  He had no time to notice that equally spaced around the chamber, some half-hidden by the fallen drapes, lay dark spheres, oozing black distillations that the shimmering drapes seemed to absorb without any change in their own coloration.

  He had no time to notice that as the Cwrth stood there in her triumph, her features twisted in pain, the grotesque swelling abruptly grew even larger, her covering more stretched, now burnished with a red deep beyond belief—that even as she stood there, a thin line formed from the jointure of her supports, questing upward with all of the determination of the universe of tentacles that now surrounded her world; questing upward and thickening until her covering split and…some thing…reached out with its own tentacles and wrapped itself around one of her supports and, still sticky and putrid with her scarlet ichor, lowered itself slowly, almost painfully, to the floor.

  He had no time to notice it draw nearer and nearer where he stood, gaining in speed and power with each passing instant.

  He had no time to notice any of these, because he was already galaxies away, wrapping himself in impossible memories that flooded and ebbed leaving nothing but darkness as his carapace cracked and his ventral plates folded in upon themselves.

  And he curled.

  The last thing he knew was the feathery touch of things icy and leathery and altogether evil invading his body through every fracture in his chitin, sucking , almost inhaling the very ichor of his being.

  He did not hear the Cwrth’s words as she lowered her arms, as the long gash in her ventral plane—now flat and sagging—closed itself seamlessly, as the monstrous carving became again a moveless bit of stone…as she shut her self off to all but the ethereal music that she alone in the chamber could hear, and said, her voice full of pity, almost mournful:

  “No. My God!”

  1 Opus: work, composition, esp. music, from L. opus, a work, labor, exertion; from Proto-Indo-European *op—, to work, produce in abundance, originally of agriculture later extended to religious acts (cf. Sanskrit, apas—work, religious act). The plural, seldom used, is opera.

  I AM TOMORROW, by Lester del Rey

  CHAPTER 1

  Idiocy wrenched at the mind of Thomas Blake; the television cameras, the fine old mansion, the people cheering, all seemed to vanish into a blankness. His mind was suddenly alien to his brain, his thoughts twisting against a weight of absolute blankness that resisted, with a fierce impulse to live. Before him, light seemed to lash down; and a grim, expressionless face swam out of nothing, while an old man’s voice dinned in ears that were curiously not his.

  It passed, almost at once, leaving only the sureness that this was more than fancy. Blake caught a quick view of himself in a monitor, spotting the sagging muscles of his face, and carrying them back to a smile. His eyes darted to the face of Gideon Pierce, and he saw that the slip could only have been momentary; his campaign manager was still smiling the too-warm smile of a profes
sional politician, creasing his fat jowls into false pleasantness.

  The shouting behind him caught Blake’s ears then, making him realize that his short speech was ended. He stood there, studying himself in the monitor. He was still lean and trim at forty, with the finest camera face in politics. To the women, he had looked like a man who was still boyish; to the men, like a man among men. And none of that had hurt, though it wasn’t the only reason he had just been conceded victory as the youngest governor of the state, on his first entry into politics.

  But under his attempt to appraise himself, Blake’s mind was still trembling as if huddled down into the familiar pattern of his physical brain. Mice, with icy feet, sneaked up his backbone, and centipedes with hot claws crawled down. No man can ever feel another brain—and yet Blake had just experienced that very feeling—contact with a vague, mindless, inchoate brain that no dream, or attack of nerves, could have conjured up for him.

  He reached for a glass of Chablis and downed it at a sudden gulp, before the wash of congratulatory handclasps could reach him. Gideon Pierce suddenly snapped to life and was at his side, sensitive to every deviation from the normal. “Nerves, Tom?”

  Blake nodded. “Excitement, I guess.”

  “Go on up, then; I’ll take care of them here.”

  For a second, Blake almost liked the man, hollow though he knew Gideon to be. He let Pierce clear the way for him, not even listening to the men’s explanations, and slipped out. Blake’s room was on the fourth floor, where he had grown up as a boy, but with a private entrance and stairs that were a later addition. He slipped up to its quiet simplicity; there, in the soft light, with the big logs burning down to coals in the fireplace, seated in his worn leather chair before his desk, he should have been safe from anything.

  He should have—but the wrenching came again. There was no light this time, but the same voice was droning frantically in the distance; and again he felt the touch of a brain, filled with stark idiocy, fighting to drive him out of its alien cells. He was aware of a difference this time, though—a coarser, cruder brain, filled with endocrine rage in spite of its lack of thought. It fought, and won, and Blake was suddenly back in his room.