The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

by Kij Johnson

  They were not alone.

  A figure stood before her: apparently young and very male, amber-skinned and long-faced, with winging eyebrows and fine-sculpted lips tipped into an expression that mingled disdain and amusement and the inutterable boredom of the gods. He wore pleated robes and a headdress she could not see clearly, as though it vibrated in and out of the visible spectrum. If he had been dressed in tweeds and scholar’s silks, he would have looked a little like a perfected version of the young men who attended her Third-Order Saddle Shapes lectures—except for his violet eyes, which were utterly mad. She knew him for a messenger of the gods.

  “You cannot stop me,” she said. The gug beside her had flattened itself to fit beneath the low ceiling, but in such a way that its four massive forepaws were free to strike. Its head was lowered, eyes on their stalks slit against the searing light, but alert.

  “Can I not?” the messenger said, and his voice was musical; but his laugh was a clashing sound like lightning striking a temple tower to the ground. “The walls are thin just here, between your little world and this room. But very well, perhaps I cannot. Still, you would be wise to pause a moment and listen to me.”

  “I am listening.” She sounded churlish in her own ears, but the less she said, the less likely was it that she would make some fatal mistake.

  “There is no reason to ascend and retrieve this descendant of a meaningless god. Your quest has come to nothing, Vellitt Boe. Ulthar is destroyed, Skai’s plains a new wasteland. Return to your world and pick up what pieces you can of your life.”

  Messenger of the gods or not, Vellitt Boe was not inexperienced in the detection of lies. She shook her head and said only, “No.”

  His violet eyes were sorrowful, though flickering in their depths was the eternal mockery. “You do not believe me. Take my hand and I will show you.”

  “No.” She stepped forward, and the gug inched forward beside her. The messenger did not move, only tipped his head and looked down at her with mad eyes.

  “I see. You cannot stop me,” said Vellitt Boe. “If you could, I would be dead already, and this chamber would be a smear of black ash. And if Ulthar were truly destroyed, you would have brought me visions and shown me relics. You are just a shadow here. You have no power.”

  His smile contained every darkness. “Perhaps, or perhaps I merely choose not stain my hands with you. Others will. And perhaps I shall go now and destroy your Ulthar, myself.”

  He vanished and in the same instant the brilliant white light in the windows winked out, as well. Vellitt found herself in utter darkness, and glibbering all about her: ghoulish cries of attack. She fumbled the pendant back around her neck and her opalic vision flared, flat and dim: the circular chamber filled with foes, the gug crammed between ceiling and floor and sweeping ghouls aside with blows of its enormous arms. She pulled the obsidian blade and fought.

  It would not have been enough if it had been Vellitt alone, but the gug was strong and, despite the close quarters, quick. It was clearing a path toward the upward staircase with its forepaws. She ran. A ghoul rose before her, and she struck it with the knife, which shattered into shards of black glass in her hand. She threw the broken hilt into its startled canine face and ran to the staircase. It was smaller than the others had been; there was no way the gug could follow her.

  She paused and turned on the bottom step. The gug was surrounded by circling ghouls nipping in with stone blades and bone cudgels to strike wherever its back was turned. Trammeled by the low ceiling, and slipping on the viscera-slick floor, the gug could not turn easily. It grasped in one of its four arms a ghoul, but as it bent down to bite off its head, another jumped, aiming a sharpened hipbone at the base of an eye-stalk.

  “No!” Vellitt cried, and leapt forward.

  And the gug, perhaps hearing her voice, reared up against the stone ceiling of the seven-windowed room. The stones groaned against one another as it heaved; and then with a terrible shrieking they broke across the gug’s shoulders. She had a sudden impression of plates of white marble, tumbling blocks of coarse gray stone, and rusting iron beams before searing light broke through the shattering roof and blinded her. She cried out and the gug surged forward. Something hit her in the head. Her last thought was a word that sorted itself into meaning as she passed out: Wisconsin.

  * * *

  Wisconsin. It was a place. It was where she was: a state in the United States, which was also where she was. It was June, which was Thargel—the sixth month of the calendar here. She knew the year, and why the years were numbered as they were. Shell Lake, Wisconsin. Midafternoon.

  New information cascaded through her mind. Her head hurt as though it had been struck (it had, she remembered), or as though it were rearranging its pathways; and this vocabulary, these concepts, were also new. She could not get her eyes open, was not even sure she was breathing or her heart beating. There was warmth on her face, a rough, hard surface beneath her. She was lying down, she realized with a flicker of relief. Dead or alive, her body remained hers. There was a steady low growl close by that did not change in pitch or stop for breath. Am I dreaming? she thought, and started laughing—for that was the one thing she certainly was not, was dreaming—and it was this that opened her eyes.

  She was lying on a broken, rough-paved lane—the word came to her, asphalt—that dipped through a hollow in a neglected cemetery beside a small temple—a church, a Lutheran church of brown brick and fieldstone, plain and unfussy. Concealing the sky were tall oaks and other trees, ones with pointed leaves, maples; and on the ground, bluegrass and fescue needing a mow, mixed with crabgrass and chickweed. Beside the lane, a mausoleum of moss-skinned marble with its lintel cracked, and a rusted iron gate gaping on its hinge.

  The steady growl beside her was the gug, or what had been the gug. The words came to her for what it was now: Buick; Riviera—which was also a seacoast in a distant land, France. 1971, the year it was built. Almost fifty years ago. And then everything: how internal combustion engines worked and where the ignition key went and how to operate the windshield wipers; synthetic 5W-40 because Wisconsin was a winter land, R44TS sparkplugs gapped to thirty thousandths—data tumbling into place until she knew the specs as well as if she had worked on the car herself, swapping the points for digital ignition and adjusting the valve train. She understood. The waking world had no place in its schema for gugs as they were, so when the gug followed her into the little cemetery, it had been reshaped into a thing that could exist: a low, slope-roofed car with a jutting front end and vertical grille, and a long, tapered back window tucked between the split, slanted back bumper; everything golden-gray with dust, as though they had just come off a long gravel road.

  She stood, a little shakily, aching and queasy from the—adrenaline—that had turned to toxins in her blood. She was wearing jeans—cotton trousers, but women wore them here—and boots, and a dark tee-shirt. She put up her hand: the red opal was still around her throat, though it no longer affected her eyesight. She was, impossibly, clean. She felt her hair’s tight twists, pulled one forward, and found it was silver and black still. There might be no admission point in this world for gugs, but for older women, apparently yes. She could feel it settling about her, what this world would expect of a woman her age. She fit scarcely more naturally here than in her own land.

  She leaned against the gug’s hood, feeling the steady rumble of the old V-8. The long haunch of the left rear bumper had been damaged in the past and repaired with Bond-o that hadn’t been painted over yet, just where the infant gug had been transfixed in the ghouls’ pit-trap so long ago. How did it feel about this transformation? Did it feel despair, trapped in steel, toothless and clawless, never to taste flesh again? Or did it delight in the bright taste of gasoline, the speed of its new muscles, the ways that clever warm hands would repair its ills?

  Through the windshield she saw a jacket thrown on the bench seat and knew without looking that she would find the same things she had carried in her
own world: the gift of Reon Atescre, matches, the gold and coins the Bursar had given her. This world: did she have a home, a job, a past here? Lovers and ex-lovers, a post at a university? Harvard Yale UW Mizzou Minnesota Menomonie Baker Oxford Cambridge Sorbonne riffled into place, like flipping through a stack of index cards. Did she have a physician—no, a primary-care provider; medications? No, these were all gaps. She had her gug and the things it carried; she had this knowledge of the waking world sifting into her mind; she had herself. This is how Randolph Carter said it had been for him when he first came to the dream lands. As a youth—teenager was the word here—he had known everything he needed, but there had been gaps.

  Vellitt stretched her back (and that, at least, felt the same) and walked onto the rough grass to look at the nearest tombstones: Voeller. Axtman. Halvorson. Johnson. She placed her finger on Anderson. The moss filling the ornate A was dry and delicate as old paper.

  She had in that first sweeping moment fully understood just how immense this waking world was. Seven billion people. How would she find Clarie Jurat in all these leagues, among all these people? Asking the question, she knew the answer. The small glossy box she had been given in Hatheg-Kla was a cell phone, lost or left behind by some dreamer in the temple of Flame. Hers, now. She leaned into the window of the car that was once a gug, and pulled it from her jacket as more details slipped into place—password protection, GPS, maps, apps. The screen flared into life at her touch. There were no signs of the man who had once owned it. There was a single name in the FAVORITES list: Clarie Jurat. She touched the name and the phone hummed in her hand. She typed the name into a search field, fingers fumbling, and a tiny map zoomed onto a blue dot labeled Clarie Jurat 789 miles.

  This was new, too: that distance here was a certain thing, unchanging.

  She got into the Buick and shifted into gear, and the gug’s voice changed pitch and volume. It was all ingrained in her, the clever coordination that changed gears or slowed down, the turn signals, the vents, the cranking windows. The rough lane turned into a winding road that led beneath dappled tree-shadow through the oldest part of the cemetery and to the main gate. She pulled into the street and stopped abruptly.

  In the cemetery it had been largely hidden from her by the shade trees—the sky, blue and entirely empty, blue and blue and blue, without tessellate shiftings, without the massy swells of otherness that bloomed in faint seething twists. Blue, featureless and weightless. A bird flew from a maple tree to the branches of an elm down the street. Beyond it, high overhead, she saw motes at the extremity of her vision, and then they swept down close enough to see that they were a flock of starlings, a cloud of them, changing directions as they flew, like a mist writhing, like gnats pillaring or herrings schooling. And behind them: the sky, empty, untextured, unmeaning, flat, and blue.

  She stared until a pickup truck swung past, honking its horn.

  * * *

  Clarie Jurat was in Miles City, Montana. The phone offered suggestions for routes, and Vellitt Boe took the quickest of them. The land she drove through reminded her of the countryside behind Celephaïs, green with trees and bright with crops, save that the hills were gentler and there were no mountains behind them, only clouds and the hollow sky.

  She passed through small towns of flat, unancient structures; houses with unornamented chimneys, wide-windowed gables, clapboard sides. The main streets were broad and faced with low buildings of brick and glass. There were larger roads lined with big boxes of concrete and steel filled with goods, and cars for sale in glittering ranks. There were signs everywhere, white, black and every color, on the highway and in the towns; street names, shop fronts, sales announcements, warnings, advertisements. No place in the dream lands was so emphatically labeled: streets and roads did not have signs, and shops had only small placards in their front windows. Even inns’ signs were pictures only. Signs were promises that a thing was here or would be there, that rules would last as long as paint. Here, nothing changed at the whims of the gods or their bitter keepers.

  There were no gods in this place. She could feel it in the same way she felt the vacuity of the massless sky. The air was empty except for the smells of June grass and recent rain, birds and the contrails of jets. Gravity seemed in some indefinable way less onerous, but it was not this that made things lighter: it was the absence of gods, as though she had walked her entire life under a heavy hide and cast it off at last.

  The gug’s engine purred westbound and came to a many-laned freeway crowded with cars of black and gray and white and the colors of the jungle birds of Kled. When she came to a town of medium size, she stopped and converted some of the gold coins to paper money. She stopped for gas. She ate chicken—which was new to her; there were no chickens in the dream lands—and drank cold tea. The gug growled steadily on, and the freeway swept her past stores, high-treed suburbs, and cluttery neighborhoods, until she came late in the afternoon to a shining city of buildings tall as crags and gleaming with crystal and steel. She passed it, and the setting sun spread its wings before her, high cirrus clouds catching fire in the sky above the tree-clustered rolling plains. The sun set and the first stars came out, Venus and Regulus, and then Beta Leonis and others: scores and then hundreds, more than she had ever imagined. She could not attend to the road, but pulled over and watched the sky bloom. Yes, millions. Billions.

  Vellitt stopped for the night in a motel: no gossipy innkip or locals drinking in the taproom downstairs, and no encircling protective wall. She had no clothes but those she stood in, so she asked advice from a civil young woman in a gray trousered suit who stood behind the front desk, and was sent to a big box that was a store. Later, she slept in a room that was a rectangle, with a black-and-white photograph of a river gorge over the immense bed.

  She dreamt that she stood upon a high marble terrace and looked out upon a hushed sunset city. Ulthar. It still existed. She was right that the god’s messenger had lied to her. A long staircase of porphyry and jasper descended to a Gate, and beyond it, she could see the underground garden in the temple on Hatheg-Kla; but the Gate was locked. She shook her head, and shaking it, awoke. She looked out the window and the moon was full, flat, and white. It moved so slowly as to be almost imperceptible, obedient to the geometries of gravity, of physics.

  Millions of stars.

  In the morning the tag on the GPS map read Clarie Jurat 467 miles. The country had changed in the hours Vellitt had driven after dark. The trees were gone, the land flatter. Only green-gold grasses remained; rare tight folds in the plains that were waterways marked by thick bands of cottonwood trees, and every so often a cluster of buildings and signs and trees marking a freeway exit. Otherwise, the land seemed as empty as a desert, a green desert alive with wind.

  She drove, and the sun drifted behind her, up, and overhead. She felt she probably had sunglasses, and it turned out she did, in the glove compartment. The gug had no air conditioning, so she drove with the windows open, and her bare arm grew hot. The air tasted of concrete and motor oil, pollen and dust and sunlight.

  The country grew rough and broke into badlands, great sections of rock shredded and tipped at angles as though they had been dropped when some unknown god’s blind tantrum had ended; but it was no god, only volcanism, glaciers, winds and rains and vast unmeasured, orderly eons of time. The badlands softened and became outcroppings among rolling hills of dry grasses and brush, pronghorns and cattle. She stopped for gas; stopped for bathrooms; stopped because she was thirsty, because she was hungry; stopped sometimes because she needed to stop and listen to the voiceless wind, and watch the empty sky.

  Clarie Jurat 217 miles. Clarie Jurat 84 miles. Clarie Jurat 12 miles.

  * * *

  Vellitt Boe found Clarie Jurat in a shop called Common Grounds, walls of brick and dark wood wrapped around the smells of baked goods and brewed coffee. She paused in the doorway and saw her behind a long steel counter. In Ulthar, Clarie had worn skirts, dresses, her University robes, square-heeled
shoes; and her hair had been a smooth, tidy braid: discreet attire, appropriate to a University woman, though her charisma had shone through. Now—how long had it been for her, here?—her black hair was a shaggy cropped tumble that fell to the nape of her neck, and there were silver hoops in her long earlobes. She wore narrow jeans with soft canvas shoes—Vans—a tee-shirt, and a black barista’s apron, and her left arm was marked with a tattoo that wrapped her from wrist to sleeve-edge.

  There was a mirror behind the coffee bar and Vellitt saw herself for a moment reflected over Jurat’s shoulder. She looked as strange to herself as Jurat did: the ropes of her hair, the black blouse opening like a crow’s wings about her throat. They were both changed, in this waking world.

  “Can I help—” Clarie Jurat said in her familiar, music-filled voice and looking up with a smile, fell abruptly silent. “Professor—Boe?”

  “Jurat,” Vellitt said, and with the word, she felt as though a longed-for freshet of water had been splashed in her face, for this was the end of her quest, she thought. At last.

  “How are you here? Is—is anything wrong? My father?”

  “Yes,” Vellitt said baldly. “Not your father, no. But yes, there is something wrong. We have to talk.”

  The bell on the door jangled. “I can’t right now,” said Clarie Jurat, as two women walked in with a stroller, a toddler dressed in brilliant purple and green hopping beside them, shouting, Choc! Choc! “Come back at seven. That’s an hour and a half.”

  Vellitt walked through Miles City: quickly done, for it was a small town but lovely, heavy with trees and grassy lawns and shade. This was the home Clarie Jurat had chosen. The schools were low brick-made things; their grounds were filled with slides, swings, climbing structures, as though children were permitted to play here. There were people everywhere, and half of them were women. The churches were silent, sleeping and godless; there was no smell of dried blood, no stains upon their calm altars.