Asimov's SF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Go ahead,” Summers said in an offended tone, “make jokes, reduce the epistemological to the scatological."

  “At least I'm making sense. Do you even know what any of the words you use mean? Listen. The blips last less than a second, right? So what good would memories—never mind ghostly supplies and equipment—what good would ideas and emotions do your ghost?"

  “To a ghost a split-second might be a whole eternity."

  “With all the people who have come through here, to say nothing of all the stuff, why aren't the monitors just screaming all the time?"

  “How the hell should I know?"

  Cutsinger made an amused sound and said, “Perhaps I can contribute to this body of speculation. Let's say that for all ghosts all eternity is crammed into the same nanosecond. Or perhaps some kind of charge builds up and all those echoes of people and things keep coming back into existence and doing whatever they do. Living out lives just like the original people, doing the same things, thinking the same thoughts. Or perhaps the scenes replay themselves with minute or not-so-minute variations, but all variations on the same theme. And always the ghosts believe they are the real thing. Then they pass right out of existence again, until the charge builds up again. Repeat and repeat, world without end. A whole world created and extinguished in a nanosecond, and it makes just enough of a disturbance to register on that monitor."

  “Just enough of one,” said Summers, “to send a chill down my spine."

  “I've come through the anomaly three times,” the doctor said, “and gone back twice. Does that mean there are five electronic ghosts of me vying for primacy in the same nanosecond of existence? Wouldn't their individual timelines get a bit tangled?"

  “Timelines!” The physicist rolled his eyes. “I've wasted enough time over the years trying to explain why it isn't time travel."

  Lane seemed not to take offense. “Very well, then. All of those alternate universes you're always going on about confuse the hell out of me. Imagine how confusing it must be for all of my ghosts."

  The physicist smiled. “Actually, I can imagine it."

  “Really now."

  “Of course I can. If I'm able to imagine multiple worlds, a series of universes receding into infinity, I can certainly imagine ghosts. Doesn't mean I believe in them, though. Only that I can imagine them."

  “ ‘I and this mystery,'” said Dr. Lane, “'here we stand.'” He saw the expressions on the faces of the other three men and laughed good-naturedly. “Walt Whitman."

  “It's getting metaphysical and poetical around here,” Cullum said. “I may have to transfer to another shift."

  Summers glanced at the clock. “Speaking of shifts, where's our relief ?"

  “I'll go ask."

  Cullum went to the door adjoining the jump station, stuck his head through, and spoke to somebody. The physicist and the doctor drifted along in Summers’ wake as he moved around the confines of the jump station taking readings and making minute adjustments.

  All three men looked up sharply as the monitor beeped again. They were still regarding it thoughtfully, in silence, when Cullum returned and told Summers, “Charlie and Zeke are here."

  The physicist started. “What?"

  “What's the problem?"

  The doctor blinked. “Nothing. Just—oh, nothing. Never mind."

  “Come on,” Cullum said to Summers, “let's go. I'm starved."

  “Me, too."

  They left Cutsinger and Dr. Lane with Charlie and Zeke and said nothing to each other until seated across from each other in the ship's mess. Then Summers looked up from his plate and said, “That physicist believed me. And that doctor—"

  “That physicist was just rhapsodizing. And that doctor believes you're nuts. Probably he believes the physicist is nuts, too. Probably that's why he goes around with him. He's the physicist's doctor."

  “You didn't see the look on his face when the same monitor beeped again."

  “The monitor again. The monitor's always beeping for no reason."

  “Nothing happens for no reason. But this is the first time that guy Cutsinger ever thought about it, I could tell."

  Back in the jump station, Charlie and Zeke checked readings and made adjustments and paid no attention to Cutsinger and the Navy doctor, who seemed frozen rigid with expectation until one of the monitors beeped. Only then did they relax.

  “Wish I could figure out what the hell that is,” said Charlie.

  “Beats me,” said Zeke.

  Dr. Lane nudged Cutsinger. “It cold in here to you?

  Copyright (c) 2008 Steven Utley

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: SHOGGOTHS IN BLOOM

  by Elizabeth Bear

  Elizabeth Bear is the 2005 John W. Campbell Award winner. Her most recent novel, Dust (Bantam Spectra), is the first in a series she describes as “Amber: Gormenghast, Upstairs: Downstairs. In space!” The author lives near Hartford with a presumptuous cat. Her New England heritage is apparent in this skilful evocation of...

  Shoggoths In Bloom

  “Well, now, Professor Harding,” the fisherman says, as his Bluebird skips across Penobscot Bay, “I don't know about that. The jellies don't trouble with us, and we don't trouble with them."

  He's not much older than forty, but wizened, his hands work-roughened and his face reminiscent of saddle-leather, in texture and in hue. Professor Harding's age, and Harding watches him with concealed interest as he works the Bluebird's engine. He might be a veteran of the Great War, as Harding is.

  He doesn't mention it. It wouldn't establish camaraderie: they wouldn't have fought in the same units or watched their buddies die in the same trenches.

  That's not the way it works, not with a Maine fisherman who would shake his head and not extend his hand to shake, and say, between pensive chaws on his tobacco, “Doctor Harding? Well, huh. I never met a colored professor before,” and then shoot down all of Harding's attempts to open conversation about the near-riots provoked by a fantastical radio drama about an alien invasion of New Jersey less than a fortnight before.

  Harding's own hands are folded tight under his armpits so the fisherman won't see them shaking. He's lucky to be here. Lucky anyone would take him out. Lucky to have his tenure-track position at Wilberforce, which he is risking right now.

  The bay is as smooth as a mirror, the Bluebird's wake cutting it like a stroke of chalk across slate. In the peach-sorbet light of sunrise, a cluster of rocks glistens. The boulders themselves are black, bleak, sea-worn, and ragged. But over them, the light refracts through a translucent layer of jelly, mounded six feet deep in places, glowing softly in the dawn. Rising above it, the stalks are evident as opaque silhouettes, each nodding under the weight of a fruiting body.

  Harding catches his breath. It's beautiful. And deceptively still, for whatever the weather may be, beyond the calm of the bay, across the splintered gray Atlantic, farther than Harding—or anyone—can see, a storm is rising in Europe.

  Harding's an educated man, well-read, and he's the grandson of Nathan Harding, the buffalo soldier. An African-born ex-slave who fought on both sides of the Civil War, when Grampa Harding was sent to serve in his master's place, he deserted, and lied, and stayed on with the Union army after.

  Like his grandfather, Harding was a soldier. He's not a historian, but you don't have to be to see the signs of war.

  “No contact at all?” he asks, readying his borrowed Leica camera.

  “They clear out a few pots,” the fisherman says, meaning lobster pots. “But they don't damage the pot. Just flow around it and digest the lobster inside. It's not convenient.” He shrugs. It's not convenient, but it's not a threat either. These Yankees never say anything outright if they think you can puzzle it out from context.

  “But you don't try to do something about the shoggoths?"

  While adjusting the richness of the fuel mixture, the fisherman speaks without looking up. “What could we do to them
? We can't hurt them. And lord knows, I wouldn't want to get one's ire up."

  “Sounds like my department head,” Harding says, leaning back against the gunwale, feeling like he's taking an enormous risk. But the fisherman just looks at him curiously, as if surprised the talking monkey has the ambition or the audacity to joke.

  Or maybe Harding's just not funny. He sits in the bow with folded hands, and waits while the boat skips across the water.

  The perfect sunrise strikes Harding as symbolic. It's taken him five years to get here—five years, or more like his entire life since the War. The sea-swept rocks of the remote Maine coast are habitat to a panoply of colorful creatures. It's an opportunity, a little-studied maritime ecosystem. This is in part due to difficulty of access and in part due to the perils inherent in close contact with its rarest and most spectacular denizen: Oracupoda horibilis, the common surf shoggoth.

  Which, after the fashion of common names, is neither common nor prone to linger in the surf. In fact, O. horibilis is never seen above the water except in the late autumn. Such authors as mention them assume the shoggoths heave themselves on remote coastal rocks to bloom and breed.

  Reproduction is a possibility, but Harding isn't certain it's the right answer. But whatever they are doing, in this state, they are torpid, unresponsive. As long as their integument is not ruptured, releasing the gelatinous digestive acid within, they may be approached in safety.

  A mature specimen of O. horibilis, at some fifteen to twenty feet in diameter and an estimated weight in excess of eight tons, is the largest of modern shoggoths. However, the admittedly fragmentary fossil record suggests the prehistoric shoggoth was a much larger beast. Although only two fossilized casts of prehistoric shoggoth tracks have been recovered, the oldest exemplar dates from the Precambrian period. The size of that single prehistoric specimen, of a species provisionally named Oracupoda antediluvius, suggests it was made by an animal more than triple the size of the modern O. horibilis.

  And that spectacular living fossil, the jeweled or common surf shoggoth, is half again the size of the only other known species—the black Adriatic shoggoth, O. dermadentata, which is even rarer and more limited in its range.

  “There,” Harding says, pointing to an outcrop of rock. The shoggoth or shoggoths—it is impossible to tell, from this distance, if it's one large individual or several merged midsize ones—on the rocks ahead glisten like jelly confections. The fisherman hesitates, but with a long almost-silent sigh, he brings the Bluebird around. Harding leans forward, looking for any sign of intersection, the flat plane where two shoggoths might be pressed up against one another. It ought to look like the rainbowed border between conjoined soap bubbles.

  Now that the sun is higher, and at their backs—along with the vast reach of the Atlantic—Harding can see the animal's colors. Its body is a deep sea green, reminiscent of hunks of broken glass as sold at aquarium stores. The tendrils and knobs and fruiting bodies covering its dorsal surface are indigo and violet. In the sunlight, they dazzle, but in the depths of the ocean the colors are perfect camouflage, tentacles waving like patches of algae and weed.

  Unless you caught it moving, you'd never see the translucent, dappled monster before it engulfed you.

  “Professor,” the fisherman says. “Where do they come from?"

  “I don't know,” Harding answers. Salt spray itches in his close-cropped beard, but at least the beard keeps the sting of the wind off his cheeks. The leather jacket may not have been his best plan, but it too is warm. “That's what I'm here to find out."

  Genus Oracupoda are unusual among animals of their size in several particulars. One is their lack of anything that could be described as a nervous system. The animal is as bereft of nerve nets, ganglia, axons, neurons, dendrites, and glial cells as an oak. This apparent contradiction—animals with even simplified nervous systems are either large and immobile or, if they are mobile, quite small, like a starfish—is not the only interesting thing about a shoggoth.

  And it is that second thing that justifies Harding's visit. Because Oracupoda's other, lesser-known peculiarity is apparent functional immortality. Like the Maine lobster to whose fisheries they return to breed, shoggoths do not die of old age. It's unlikely that they would leave fossils, with their gelatinous bodies, but Harding does find it fascinating that to the best of his knowledge, no one has ever seen a dead shoggoth.

  * * * *

  The fisherman brings the Bluebird around close to the rocks, and anchors her. There's artistry in it, even on a glass-smooth sea. Harding stands, balancing on the gunwale, and grits his teeth. He's come too far to hesitate, afraid.

  Ironically, he's not afraid of the tons of venomous protoplasm he'll be standing next to. The shoggoths are quite safe in this state, dreaming their dreams—mating or otherwise.

  As the image occurs to him, he berates himself for romanticism. The shoggoths are dormant. They don't have brains. It's silly to imagine them dreaming. And in any case, what he fears is the three feet of black-glass water he has to jump across, and the scramble up algae-slick rocks.

  Wet rock glitters in between the strands of seaweed that coat the rocks in the intertidal zone. It's there that Harding must jump, for the shoggoth, in bloom, withdraws above the reach of the ocean. For the only phase of its life, it keeps its feet dry. And for the only time in its life, a man out of a diving helmet can get close to it.

  Harding makes sure of his sample kit, his boots, his belt-knife. He gathers himself, glances over his shoulder at the fisherman—who offers a thumbs-up—and leaps from the Bluebird, aiming his wellies at the forsaken spit of land.

  It seems a kind of perversity for the shoggoths to bloom in November. When all the Northern world is girding itself for deep cold, the animals heave themselves from the depths to soak in the last failing rays of the sun and send forth bright flowers more appropriate to May.

  The North Atlantic is icy and treacherous at the end of the year, and any sensible man does not venture its wrath. What Harding is attempting isn't glamour work, the sort of thing that brings in grant money—not in its initial stages. But Harding suspects that the shoggoths may have pharmacological uses. There's no telling what useful compounds might be isolated from their gelatinous flesh.

  And that way lies tenure, and security, and a research budget.

  Just one long slippery leap away.

  He lands, and catches, and though one boot skips on bladderwort he does not slide down the boulder into the sea. He clutches the rock, fingernails digging, clutching a handful of weeds. He does not fall.

  He cranes his head back. It's low tide, and the shoggoth is some three feet above his head, its glistening rim reminding him of the calving edge of a glacier. It is as still as a glacier, too. If Harding didn't know better, he might think it inanimate.

  Carefully, he spins in place, and gets his back to the rock. The Bluebird bobs softly in the cold morning. Only November 9th, and there has already been snow. It didn't stick, but it fell.

  This is just an exploratory expedition, the first trip since he arrived in town. It took five days to find a fisherman who was willing to take him out; the locals are superstitious about the shoggoths. Sensible, Harding supposes, when they can envelop and digest a grown man. He wouldn't be in a hurry to dive into the middle of a Portuguese man o’ war, either. At least the shoggoth he's sneaking up on doesn't have stingers.

  “Don't take too long, Professor,” the fisherman says. “I don't like the look of that sky."

  It's clear, almost entirely, only stippled with light bands of cloud to the southwest. They catch the sunlight on their undersides just now, stained gold against a sky no longer indigo but not yet cerulean. If there's a word for the color between, other than perfect, Harding does not know it.

  “Please throw me the rest of my equipment,” Harding says, and the fisherman silently retrieves buckets and rope. It's easy enough to swing the buckets across the gap, and as Harding catches each one, he secures it. A few
moments later, and he has all three.

  He unties his geologist's hammer from the first bucket, secures the ends of the ropes to his belt, and laboriously ascends.

  Harding sets out his glass tubes, his glass scoops, the cradles in which he plans to wash the collection tubes in sea water to ensure any acid is safely diluted before he brings them back to the Bluebird.

  From here, he can see at least three shoggoths. The intersections of their watered-milk bodies reflect the light in rainbow bands. The colorful fruiting stalks nod some fifteen feet in the air, swaying in a freshening breeze.

  From the greatest distance possible, Harding reaches out and prods the largest shoggoth with the flat top of his hammer. It does nothing in response. Not even a quiver.

  He calls out to the fisherman. “Do they ever do anything when they're like that?"

  “What kind of a fool would come poke one to find out?” the fisherman calls back, and Harding has to grant him that one. A Negro professor from a Negro college. That kind of a fool.

  As he's crouched on the rocks, working fast—there's not just the fisherman's clouds to contend with, but the specter of the rising tide—he notices those glitters, again, among the seaweed.

  He picks one up. A moment after touching it, he realizes that might not have been the best idea, but it doesn't burn his fingers. It's transparent, like glass, and smooth, like glass, and cool, like glass, and knobby. About the size of a hazelnut. A striking green, with opaque milk-white dabs at the tip of each bump.

  He places it in a sample vial, which he seals and labels meticulously before pocketing. Using his tweezers, he repeats the process with an even dozen, trying to select a few of each size and color. They're sturdy—he can't avoid stepping on them but they don't break between the rocks and his wellies. Nevertheless, he pads each one but the first with cotton wool. Spores? he wonders. Egg cases? Shedding?

  Ten minutes, fifteen.

  “Professor,” calls the fisherman, “I think you had better hurry!"