Future Lovecraft (22 page)

***

Tasha dreamed of the moon and stars, her mind metaphorically one with Gyorgi’s. It was while she slept in that way that she often felt she understood the most.

Tasha dreamed of the following morning—no need for TV, now—as the L.M. opened and three men dismounted, bulky in spacesuits. She walked with the first of them into the shadows.

She saw the balloon first, the one Poe had dreamed of in his chronicle of the Hollander-Cosmonaut, Hans Pfaall. She saw its bent hoop, its tangled netting, its bag-covered gondola—more than even her husband could see because her eyes were clearer. She saw the projectile that Jules Verne envisioned, fired from the giant columbiad cannon, which, even if it had not achieved touchdown, still lay on its side in the shadow before her.

She saw other shapes, too, arrayed in long rows. Rows that converged on the central mountain. A bicycle-like frame, surrounded by skeletons of long-dead geese; another, surrounded by metal spheres. The V2-like slimness of Robert Heinlein’s and Willy Ley’s coupled dream, made into cinematic flesh in a film she’d seen once when she was a child,
Destination Moon
. And yet other shapes, too, saucer-like nightmares, the visions of men like Jessup and Scully that lay, side by side, with truly
non
-human dreams. Shapes to fit truly non-human proportions....

She blinked.

... and yet, all dead. The ships crushed and broken....

She
heard
Gyorgi thinking:

...Let us put bones, then. This plain would be nothing but an immense cemetery, on which would repose the mortal remains of thousands of extinct generations....

She woke. Yes, a graveyard. A graveyard of spaceships. The words were not Gyorgi’s, though, but—she thought back—those of Michel Arden. The French adventurer in Jules Verne’s novel.

She blinked. On Earth, in Houston, the Sun would have just gone down—she’d slept the whole day through. Far to the west, the Moon would be setting, too; this time, she wouldn’t see even a sliver.

The TV monitor was still on, the equipment functioning automatically. She heard its static. She sat up to look at it, seeing the images, shadowy, fleck-filled.

“...Tomorrow, we’ll rig lights that we can take with us,” her husband was saying. NASA was gentle, unlike the Cosmonaut Corps of her own nation—first, they must have rest. “Those, with the portable camera we have now, may give more information on those oddly shaped rocks we’ve found.” Then, he had
not
seen.

She sank back to the couch as he gave his description. A cemetery, yes, laid in rows, but still
only
stone and dust.

Only she saw what was buried beneath it.

***

Gyorgi!
she screamed—knowing he couldn’t hear her, not outside—watching her husband step from the L.M. the final time. Half-dreaming, half waking-in front of the monitor, she waited as the three astronauts, in blazing light now, walked through the ships’ graveyard, her own spacecraft having swung back around the Moon too late to do anything more than just watch them. She saw, with her vision, the L.M. itself, in the line of corpses. The crushing of Men’s dreams.

But Gyorgi could
not
see.

During the night, she’d recalled, in her mind’s eye, those last days before the launch. Her husband’s arguments with NASA that not only had she had cosmonaut experience—something of an exaggeration, at best—but also that, as a woman, with a woman’s patience and natural steadiness, her presence in orbit around the Moon would impart a steadfastness in those that were on its surface. But he had been wrong. She did not have patience. Not for the sort of waiting she did now, wanting to see,
straining
to see, what, even with the aid of their cameras, her husband could at best describe only dimly.

Except....

Except that she
did
see. The loneliness and stress produced visions in her mind. She’d looked to her instruments first, of course, the “Christmas tree” panel lights all still glowing green, just in case it might be some bad mix of air. She’d checked and re-checked again, thinking at one point she might call NASA to ask
their
opinion, but, no, she had best not—why cause needless worries? It was only the loneliness, after all, that and the fitfulness of her sleep habits, despite the schedule of sleep-times NASA had asked her to follow.

But how
could
she have slept otherwise, now that Gyorgi and the others were on the Moon’s surface?

And so, the visions came, these from the books she had hoarded that autumn. The dreams of a Heinlein, naive and hope-filled, mixed with the more cautious, Gallic optimism of Verne. And the darker, although still ambiguous, visions of Wells and Poe—Poe, with his bleakness, his soul-searing horror, still having his astronaut dream, too, of fields of Selenite poppies. Of lakes and forests.

But, then, Lovecraft’s
colours
. His dreams of far Yuggoth. Her own dreams, no less terrible for their having been lived once, of Hitler and Stalin, of KGB horrors. Poe, at his worst, still foresaw
some
brightness, some faint trace of Byelobog. While the other, his fellow American prophet of darkness....

She didn’t complete the thought. Something was happening. Lights played on rock spires—spaceships as
she
saw, but still looking stonelike to the others. And now behind them, as they climbed the talus of Tsiolkovsky’s mountain.

“Over here, quickly!” The voice was not Gyorgi’s. Rather, the Frenchman’s, also with an accent. She watched as the camera panned, saw his lights sparkle. And then...deeper darkness.

“I don’t know, Gyorgi.” The voices crackled. “What do you think, then?”

“A cavern of some sort.”

No, Gyorgi!
she thought. But he could not hear her. Nor could she call down to the L.M. to warn them, because there was no one inside to receive the call, and their suit radios were designed only for communications between one another.

And so, she could only watch as they entered. Half-seeing, half-dreaming—was it a cave mouth? Some huge sort of airlock?

She still heard their voices, that much of her still tracking them on the monitor.

“Sloping down....”

“Smooth-floored. Almost circular in its cross-section....”

“Almost—what do you think?”

“Almost as if it were artificial.... “

She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening, while, at the same time, she still stared at the TV. The sudden swirling beneath the men’s feet, as if their descent took them into a mist....

“Some kind of gas, maybe. Do you know what this means?”

“That the Moon has an atmosphere of sorts. But so thin, so tenuous that it exists only beneath the surface. Look, you go out—check the wire antenna. Make sure we’re still broadcasting up to the C.M. Then bring back a container of some sort for a sample.”

She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening. She saw a huge comet, and yet, not a comet. A spaceship itself, crashing into the Moon.

Blasting a crater two hundred and more kilometers wide—the aftershock throwing up its central mountain. The occupant, wounded....

Byelobog shattered. Dead. Chernobog crawling out, once the Moon’s floor had cooled, finding a cleft in the newly formed mountain. A hole to bore into. To bide its time ...hiding.

And on the TV screen, the mist coalescing. Shadowy, whirling.

Forming tendrils.

The vision of H.G. Wells’
War of the Worlds
. A hollow stone turning, revealing metal. Tentacles reaching out. Except....

Except,
much
vaster.

Edgar Allan Poe’s
horrors most stern and most appalling
, yet vaster and darker still.

What
she
saw now, her mind’s grasp expanding....

To bide its time from the time the Moon was young, over the eons, until it was stronger. And while it was waiting, to draw others to it.

The children, perhaps, of spores it had scattered on its mad journey—some, even, that came to Earth—to draw their strength back into its own body.

And, even it, perhaps the
smallest
of entities....

Coalescing. She
saw
. In her dream, she tried to
send
—somehow—some warning to Gyorgi.

That
something
stared back at her.

Knowing. Not knowing. The myths
were
metaphors. Human and nonhuman, all of the same spawn. Dazhbog and Myesyats. Byelobog. Chernobog. All of them part of the same dark evil....

***

Tasha woke, crying, to NASA’s frantic calls via the Space Station, demanding to know why she had stopped transmitting. Outside, she could see the Earth, bathed in full sunlight. Yet, cold and colourless.

On the TV, static. There was no picture.

She closed her eyes,
straining
. Trying to dream again. Trying to find some trace of her husband.

Then, slowly, she sat up and straightened her clothing and opened the C.M.’s own, separate transmission link, wondering, as she did, what exact words she could use to tell NASA.

***

There would be no springtime.

TRAJECTORY OF A CURSED SPIRIT

By Meddy Ligner

Meddy Ligner
was born in 1974, in Bressuire, a small town in the western part of France. He spent his first 18 years there. He goes back frequently to see his family and to play baseball with the famous
Garocheurs
. He studied history. Afterward, he taught French abroad: in Finland, Russia and China. Since 2003, he has worked as a teacher of history and geography in Poitiers (France) where he is living with his wife, daughter and son. His website is:
http://meddyligner.blogspot.com
.

War and Punishment

THEY WOULD FINALLY land. Expected and feared at the same time, the end of the voyage was very close. Surrounded by his companions in misfortune, who, like him, were backed to the metal wall, Maxim Brahms scratched at length his salt-and-pepper beard and reflected on the past.

He remembered the war that he had led in the course of these last few years. A war implacable, without mercy. A crusade against those who were called “the enemies of the people”. A devoted servant of the regime, he had fought the plotters, spies, saboteurs, and other counterrevolutionaries of every kind. In the course of this ferocious battle, Brahms had jailed them with a vengeance, separating whole families, deporting innocents, and obeying orders with zeal.
For nothing. Or rather, to end up here, as one of the damned.
He nearly retched.

Like so many others before him, he had ended up engulfed by yet another purge. His Party card, his advantageous position in the apparatus of the State, had done him no good. When they came to find him in his apartment, cozy in the middle of the night, Maxim had understood.
The swine.
He had barely time to kiss his wife and his son.
Natasha and Alex, what are you doing right now?
By the time he was brought to an unknown prison, he realised that he had seen them for the last time.

They accused him of deviation. Confessions obtained under torture. His trial was even more expeditious. He didn’t know why, but he’d escaped summary execution and was condemned to deportation in perpetuity. On Mars.
But is that better than death?
For a long time now, Siberia had gone out of fashion. That region, which had become a zone for the privileged population, had given way to another hell: the Marslag. The final step for those who disrupted. The asshole from which one never returned. Mars the Pitiless.

To reach this charming corner, the prisoners had to pass two months in the interior of a rotten cabin in the vessel
October
: a ruined engine that, for three decades, had watered insatiable Mars with new detainees. These miserable ones were stuck there, penned like cattle, packed like sardines, for the long and punishing voyage across the cosmos. They had become damned souls, errant spirits, empty of their human substance.
In coming here, we have won a one-way ticket to the abyss.

With a terrible din, the
October
finally landed on the Martian soil.

Their chains were connected at the feet, as in the time of the tsars. The prison guards barked, violently pushing the slower prisoners. The aggressiveness oozed from every pore of their skins. Cudgels rained down. The guards drove the procession of phantoms to the exit of the spacecraft. With each step, his irons cut his foot, but Maxim said nothing. He knew that it was useless to complain. They were brought along an immense corridor with immaculate walls, connecting the
October
to the Martian base. Their metal chains rattling, the convicts trudged along the vast corridor. At the mid-point, they passed under a huge, red banner, on which stood out letters of gold:

“ДOБPO ПOЖAЛOBATЬ HA MAPC. 3ДECЬ MЫ CTPOИM COЦИЯЛИCM.”

“Welcome to Mars. Here, we build the new socialism.”
Such bullshit....

They arrived, finally, under a vast dome whose walls were totally transparent. There, for the first time, their haggard eyes could contemplate a Martian landscape. Shacks were planted in the middle of a crimson valley on the cracked surface. They noticed immediately that there was no line of barbed wire, no watchtower. The Martian environment was the antidote to any attempt to flee. An unbreathable atmosphere, a sterile world situated millions of kilometers from Earth. This was explained to them, shouted out, by the head of the base, under the guise of a welcoming speech.

A little farther to the left, in the region of one hundred metres, the prisoners could see the cyclopean profiles of the Fathers of the Revolution, which had been carved in the rock of a cliff. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin stared down at the pestiferous unfortunates, which included Maxim. The scene immediately evoked for him an old, dog-eared postcard given to him by his father when he had been only a child. The image, which had risen from his memories like a bubble of air to the surface of the water, represented the American presidents sculpted onto a mountain.

The filthy mass of men was then pushed toward the decontamination rooms. They were washed, dressed, then directed to the refectory.

There, while they ate, slogans to the glory of the empire echoed.
Obviously, brainwashing was part of the treatment inflicted in the Marslag....

Then, once they had hed, they were sent to the boarding area. Now, their lives as pariahs could begin.

It remained to exploit the riches that abounded on Mars, and of which the Motherland was fond. As no volunteer was crazy enough to come here, the authorities had decided to create a new paradise from forced labour. The Marslag. The prisoners represented a mass of free and exploitable labour, even if their life expectancy was not very high. Between the beatings by prison guards, the lack of food, and work to the limits of human capacity, the existence of a convict did not weigh very heavily with the authorities.

They brought the prisoners into a locker room with cracked walls, filled with outdated and dirty lockers. There, they put on their spacesuits and then, under the watchful eye of supervisors, they boarded the craft that would lead them to the mine.

Once inside, Maxim stuck to the glass porthole. The desolate land of Mars marched under his wide eyes: stony hills, speckled with brown stones and cutting the horizon out of sight, fields of somber rocks in jagged shapes, a sky reddish and sad. A little farther, cliffs plunged toward an immense, scarlet plain. Immobile and silent.

“Look over there, at the bottom.”

These words emanated from a stony voice. That of an old man, sitting next to Maxim.
Dirty-looking, the Ancestor...
His face, cracked and weary, reflected the many years abandoned here, but in his grey-green eyes still danced the flame of intelligence. Max did not blink, leaving the stranger to continue:

“That’s Mount Olympus. An altitude of 27 km. The highest summit on Mars. And in the Solar System.”

Max did not know how to respond to the stranger. They always said to remain on guard and say nothing of import to anyone...The Marslag had a reputation as a nest of crabs, each one ready to eat the others. Finally, it was the grandfather who decided to continue:

“We’re braking. We’re arriving at our destination.”

Max opened his eyes wide and what he saw unmanned him:

“Jesus Christ!”

***

Faced with the immense, open-pit mine, he believed he found himself at the mouth of Hell. The spectacle was enough to shake the strongest of souls. There, resembling an army of insects, worked thousands of men, turning the soil over a surface, and at a depth, that was staggering. Their effort was colossal.

The prisoners were hustled outside.
My first steps on Mars....

“You risk having some difficulties in adapting, but you should master your movements pretty rapidly. Here, it’s necessary to move in small steps that are facilitated by the weak gravity. On the Red Planet, you weigh three times less than on Earth.”

Always the same old man. This time, Maxim decided to respond to him.

“Okay, thanks, Comrade.”

“Spare me the ceremony. In Marslag, we are all pariahs. The only goal that drives us is summed up in one word: ‘Survive’. My name is ‘Fyodor’. Welcome to Hell.”

“Mine is Maxim Brahms. Everyone calls me Max.”

The guards gave their orders. As he did not know what to do, Maxim imitated his new companion. There ran, some steps away from the condemned, a four-wheel-drive, diesel robot. Its steel legs methodically searched the red soil and mined ore. The mission for Brahms and his comrades was simple: to transport the ore to cargo containers. They then had to push carts weighing several tons over hundreds of meters. Despite the feeble gravity, it was exhausting work. A grueling task that shriveled the brain and reduced those executing it to the state of a machine. Turning back and forth like hungry wasps, the warders perched on their quads, which functioned on solar energy, keeping a constant eye on their charges and ensuring that the cadences of labour did not decrease.

“Your spacesuit is your best protection. It allows you to deal with the radiation and dust. Ensure that your water supply and air ventilation systems remain in perfect condition in your backpack. The equipment is often obsolete and mortal accidents are legion. So, take good care of....”

Old Fyodor had definitely wanted to talk....

“You seem to know a thing or two. How long have you been here?” Maxim asked.

The exhausted face of the convict stared so hard at him that Maxim was embarrassed.

“I’ve been in this shithole for almost seventeen years...accused, without proof, of counterespionage. And you? Why are you here?”

“Shut up, Old Man! Concentrate on your work!”

One of the guards came over to strike him with a rifle butt. The old man sank to his knees. He began to implore this cerberus for mercy. The other insulted him. Max believed the guard might execute the old man, but finally, he was called away to other tasks.

“Those guards are garbage, scum, dogs that have the taste of blood, said Fyodor. Always ready to fuck you over. Watch out for them like the plague.”

***

In the evening, when they returned to their Spartan dormitories, the convicts ate and were directed immediately to their bunks, exhausted as they were by their life of slavery. Maxim Brahms was no exception. This first day in the Marslag had exhausted his strength.
I will never last several years....
Here, no Sunday, no weekend, let alone any vacation. The Marslag worked round the clock, with no stops.

Some men already slept, but Max joined the group around an old samovar that smoked in the corner. Tortured by curiosity, he started the discussion.

“Hasn’t anyone ever succeeded in escaping the Marslag?”

The other prisoners stared at him, flabbergasted as if Max had suggested they take their vacations on a sandy beach.

“It’s impossible to get out of here,” said one of them, whose face was streaked with a huge scar. “It’s said that two or three convicts managed to stow away in a compartment and get off this cursed planet. They left and were never caught. But how did they do it? The rest is a mystery....”

The other detainees regarded him in exhaustion. Fyodor took the opportunity to speak.

“In every prison, and since their birth in the dawn of Man, there have existed such tales, touched perhaps by myth. These legendary escapes have a base in reality; I’m sure of it.”

The man with the scar could not repress a grin. In contrast, Maxim became curious.

“What have you heard about that, Fyodor?”

“Don’t listen to him. He’s just a crazy old man.”

Scarface does not appear to agree with my friend.
Fyodor was uncowed. His face radiated calm. He replied:

“I believe in less-rational explanations. In times immemorial, Mars was a world as joyous as Earth, with forests, prairies, seas, and oceans. It possessed a fauna and flora both rich and diverse...In this antediluvian epoch, some kind of Gods ruled on the surface of Mars. One called them the Great Old Ones.”

“You’re completely cracked, Fyodor! You’ve said all that before. It’s just bullshit!” the scarred man insisted.

“But where did you hear all this, Fyodor?” Maxim asked, curious to know more.

“I’m just repeating what someone told me. It was a long time ago.”

“But how do you explain that, today, there is nothing left of that time?”

“I don’t know. It was a very long time ago. That time has been forgotten by us.”

“And where did these Great Old Ones go?”

“They live hidden in the entrails of the Red Planet....”

“I’ve heard enough for tonight! I leave you now. Until tomorrow.”

The man with the scar stood up. He persuaded a goodly part of the audience to imitate him.

“Same for me. All this nonsense has exhausted me. Good night, everyone!” said another man.

Finally, only Max remained with the old man, who went on, murmuring:

“Watch yourself. Here, you can be betrayed by the most unimportant thing, especially if you speak of escape. Be on your guard....”

“All right...and these histories of the Great Old Ones...do you truly believe them?”

Without responding, Fyodor stood up slowly and headed toward his bed. He lifted his dusty mattress and pulled out a piece of rock.

“Look. I found this one day, not far from the mine.”

With curiosity, Max inspected the object. It was a red rock, typical of the Martian surface. On one side, it was cut in a chaotic fashion, but on the other, it was smooth, flat, almost...polished. And on the surface, there was painted a design representing a sort of mouth. Or rather, the mouth of an animal, almost reptilian, with teeth pointed and large.

“What is it?”

“The proof of the existence of the Gods.”

Stunned, Maxim didn’t know what to say. It seemed that reality was collapsing under his feet. It was too feeble to face the rantings of this old
mujik
. He decided to flee.

“I’m going to sleep. Good night.”