Future Lovecraft (12 page)

THE OLD 44TH

By Randy Stafford

By day,
Randy Stafford
practices the dark arts of tax collection for his master and counsels his minions in the same. At night, after the anguished cries have faded from his ears, he cowers in his Minnesota domicile, comforted by his wife and an extensive collection of books and DVDs. He writes many a book review for Amazon. Every few years, he writes some poetry and, besides being an American Academy of Poets award winner in his long-ago-vanished college days, he has published poetry in
National Review Online
and
2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology
, and book reviews in
Leading Edge
.

There is a geometry of Death.

I have seen its streets and paths

In the records of my father,

From the old 44th.

Krasten’s streets were open

And straight like their minds,

Calling for our wares

And for our human ideas.

So, they baited their minds for the Hounds,

Pack predators from forests outside spacetime.

They came and killed, as did my father,

With comrades, to add another legend to the old 44th.

And as he, the last of the 44th,

Lay dying, his kit listened,

Watched as the last of the Hounds

Loped past the terminus of the city.

Right there, where the mesa ends,

And their blue, frothy Hound blood

Shone under the moons,

Is where they’re kenneled.

The Angles, kinks of rectitude,

Hide them in the Beyond,

And in our world of circles,

There’s always more like the old 44.

IRON FOOTFALLS

By Julio Toro San Martin

Julio Toro San Martin
resides and writes in Toronto, Canada.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days...

I said to Dawn: Be sudden–to Eve: Be soon;

With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over

From this tremendous Lover!...

Halts by me that footfall;

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

— “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson

Year 562 NNPE

SHE CROUCHES ALONE in a corner, waiting quietly for you, her prosthetic reader barely registering her enclosed environment. She waits and remembers when her father first told her the dream of you. You were the embryo, the idea, the fixation in his brain, throbbing constantly like a metronome. How many versions of you there were, at first, she can’t now remember, but when something finally like yourself—
your terrible self
—emerged from the compass of his craft, his workshop cocoon, she naively marvelled at the sight.

From somewhere, she hears the powerful disemboguements of the Ion-Plasma weapons. The tearing of metal. What a strange sound metal makes when it rips like paper. Tremors shake the walls. Loud blasts set air particles quivering. Then comes the silence. How many station drones have you destroyed now, Brother? Perhaps hundreds? She places her one biochemical hand against the cold, metallic sheen of a wall and thinks she can feel the steady, diminishing pulse of the CompuMind, retreating into itself, like a lanky, frightened tentacle into a deep hole. And then she hears your footfalls again.

Steady. Steady. Moving in her direction.

She wonders if you wonder how Father felt when you were almost complete. She wonders how he felt, too.

As a young soldier, her father could remember being taken to the peripheries of the Oort Cloud. There, in the Rim System, where human habitation barely penetrated, from the windows of an interplanetary carrier, he could see the silent spaces beyond, stretching to eternity, where, in unfathomable distances, lay the cluttered stars, eons old. Stars, that had never known human passions, sickness, evil, war. Staring into those abysses of beautiful darkness and uncountable time, he had felt peace, awe, silence, and all the ages of strife had seemed as nothing to him, then. This is what she imagines he felt then, looking at you, as they both stood on this lone asteroid hurtling quietly through open space, around a star that’s been its companion since before life ever appeared on Earth: when the first planets were formed in early times out of the primordial, galactic ooze; when the stardust first touched the nascent valleys and mountains of his homeworld, and the first sunrises were there to be recorded by no one, until mankind had come.

Do you grasp the sublimity of the image, the awe of time and eternity, the feeling of vastness, of grandeur—do you feel anything at all,
she wonders,
Brother?

She’s lost. The only difference she can imagine between you is that her darkness is the blackness of this station, where the lights have all gone out, while your darkness is the blackness of the soul, where no light shines and perhaps never shone.

She says,
This darkness, this nutshell, this being locked up, inside and out, this claustrophobia is becoming maddening.

She reaches out with her mechanised hand and cybersynapses instantaneously make her realise she’s touching blood. Dry blood—her own.

Your footfalls are getting closer.

From the corridors and the nearby airlock, she hears snippets of her absent father’s recorded mad talk, disjointed and emanating from the comm centres scattered throughout the station. They say:

***

His name was Talus, made of iron mold,

Immovable, resistless, without end;

Who in his hand an iron flail did hold,

With which he threshed out Falsehood, and did Truth unfold.*

***

War. Drudgery. Pain. Death. Hopelessness. Destruction. War. Mankind. I will soon put right a mistake that never should have happened.

***

Oh, how I long for you to live, Talus!

***

His footfalls are coming faster, now, girl. Unstoppable. The booming echoes—gigantic. Like a mad-brained, moonstruck hound, he’s homing in on you.

***

He will walk, breathe, and learn by uncontrollable compulsions like great, heaving seas of lava.

***

Time is running out. She, however, has not given up hope. She believes some message will reach her father, the planets, or at least a stray ship.

Sadly, no help will ever reach her.
She is alone
, too far from anyone.

We see this all and laugh.

Close now are your iron footfalls. With majestic instancy they beat.

Crouching, she uncoils the segments of her cyborged arm, which then part and configure into two snake-like appendages that input into a wall panel nearby, joining metal to metal. Direct communication with the central brain of the CompuMind is now possible. She feels the totality of the station and, in cyberspace throughout it all, lurking,
a foreign mind
, hunting and sniffing for her. She bypasses this
presence
whenever she senses it and secretly whispers with the CompuMind in a shut psyche-lock. Her waiting is almost over, she tells it. The CompuMind warns her it hasn’t stored enough energy, yet.

Her hastily-attached synthetic reader, resembling a goggle, retracts and re-lenses. Visual images, albeit poorly, allow her to focus more closely on the end of the lightless corridor.

Your footfalls have stopped, Brother.

A small scoutdrone is suddenly thrust into her line of vision. The drone makes a horrible screech and red lights begin to flash violently around it. She quickly tries to re-lens, to get a better optical reading, but before she can, we feel the drone’s insides ballooning with your meaty metal, Brother, until it explodes, leaving your gleaming feelers quivering with excitement.

Shards of the scoutdrone hit her, cutting and jabbing into her organic parts. She loses her balance and falls over, hitting her plated head, yet still, she manages to remain hooked to the wall panel.

Though dazed, the primitive lizard brain in her humanity causes her to involuntarily send a shocked, lightning-like panic signal to the CompuMind. It answers in kind.

Reams of corded electricity shoot out from capacitors hidden throughout the corridor and impact on you fantastically. Energy illumes you, flashing and exploding in blinding, brilliant lights. Erratically, you still advance, like a dark planet rising within a molten sun. Her lens refocuses and she sees your shape, full of wrong angles and impossible edges and strangely moving contraptions that should not fit together. You heat up like the core of a red-hot star.

She begins to feel pain.
Terrible, burning pain
. Her flesh bubbles. Her metal heats.

We hear the CompuMind say, in a tone too emotional for a machine, “Impossible! Impossible! Nineteen dimensional spaces! Curved space collapsing, inconceivable angles surfacing!” And then it goes silent. The charges cease, darkness comes and, at long last, ends the chase.

Now your
being
is upon her like a looming horror. She feels your electrified presence. She sees your terrible hand reach out to her. She awaits her death bravely.

But nothing happens.

She feels, above, your hand swing past her, like a bird of prey swooping for the kill and then leaving. You pass by her like a planet swing. Uninterested. Walking around her.

She turns to see your footfalls recede and then vanish into a wall. You are now on the outside of the asteroid. Your massive shape is moving away. Your alien intent and intelligence are incomprehensible to her.
An intelligence more like ours
.

How you yearn to set us free. The blessed impurity of angular Space-Time will soon enter her dimension.

Once, there was a God of love and spirit; now they have fashioned a god of metal and of the outer hells. Her father wanted to destroy those responsible for their ceaseless war and then start anew, yet through our influence he created instead a sentient machine, designed to perpetrate genocide on its own creators.

You are like a scapegoat, Brother. In times long gone, when her species was as yet young, they would lay their sins upon a goat and send it into the wastes to die. This creature bore the sins of the people and they would be cleansed of their sins. You, the Talus Machine, are the last scapegoat come back out of the wastes, bearing their sins back to them.

As she prepares to hunt for you on the asteroid, she hears your voice inside her head, metallic and scratchy, say the ultimate incomprehensibility to her mind:
Witness as I fall into the sun and pull the worlds down
. Then your heavy feet push away from the asteroid.
Senseless,
she thinks.
Utter, complete senselessness.

Seconds pass and then she begins to feel the pull—the great, gravitational pull of the collapsing sun that will soon form into a fast-burgeoning black hole, from which nothing will escape.

These are the last hours of her species. Unbeknownst to her, on Earth, a few days past, the Great Old Ones rose in madness from their sleep and plunged with worshippers and slaves towards the blasphemous, ultra-dimensional, black planet of Yuggoth. And now, the last portal to Tindalos will soon be opened.

Sasana Xavi VI rushes to a window, horrified. The stars in the night-black sky begin to burn out. The celestial bodies move. The asteroid shifts forcefully towards the sun. She looks one last time and then the lights of the universe go out.

We will soon howl free from
the other side
of our prison-home. It will soon be time for a new arrangement.

*From Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
, Book V, Canto I.

THIS SONG IS NOT FOR YOU

By A. D. Cahill 

Avery Cahill
has worn many hats in his life, from working at a cheese factory to Lecturer of Classics. He’s lived in Japan, Italy and Norway, but currently awaits the End Of Time while waging a losing war against fire ants in Florida. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in Dog Oil Press and Innsmouth Free Press. Tweeting as Falcifer9000 or blogging at scythe-bearing chariot in the 2D world, he shouts into the meaningless void.

This song is not for you.

The golden pipes sound

Flat fifths on alien scales

Around the all-consuming sun.

A black sun.

Their notes are not for you.

He is pleased.

His writhing, festering pleasure

Strikes a ten-dimensional cord.

He consumes himself,

Excretes himself.

Weaves space, weaves time.

A star. Galaxies. Light.

These endless forms are not for you.

DAL NIENTE

The pitch shifts.

The dance pauses,

And in the rests between

That awful melody,

In the emptiness,

In the void,

In the inhalation before the note,

you.

On dust, you stand

And laugh, and sing

And lust, and cry,

And slay and rut.

And build your cities,

And fight your wars,

And gaze longingly into the void.

A great, sordid emptiness

In the song that is not for you.

The screaming ant

Clamps a morsel,

Dragging it home along

A hormone leash.

Your blood burns.

The sun is warm.

The sky blue and cool.

You know with a vengeance that

I am I.

Yet, this song is not for you.

PERDENDOSI...

A voice in the centre,

The very centre,

Away and down,

Deep, deep down,

Infinitely far away.

The black sun answers the trilling pipes.

The pipes fall silent.

The strings relax.

The terrible dance winds down.

Galaxies rip.

Stars fade.

The eve of atoms has come.

Quivering in entropic ecstasy,

The song is done.

...AL NIENTE

You follow in the wind,

wherever the played note goes,

a node on a silent string.

None of it was for you.