Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (84 page)

The new country was called Yisroel Diaspora
.

Its leader under the feminist world order was Tanit Shadrapha. This name means
the healer Ishtar.

The feminist world order promoted scientific research, largely from bases in Yisroel Diaspora. Space exploration, long abandoned except for the development of orbiting weapons-systems, was resumed. Bases were established on the planet Mars and among the asteroids. A crewed ship orbited Venus, making close observations and sending robot monitors and samplers to the surface of the planet. Venus was found to be a worthless and inhospitable piece of real estate
.

A landing was attempted on the surface of Mercury. The expedition was an ambitious undertaking. The lander was to touch down just on the dark side of the planetary terminator, thence to be carried into the night. During the Mercurian night it would burrow beneath the surface. By the time the terminator was reached and the ship entered the day side, it would be safely entombed and would, in effect, estivate through the searing Mercurian day
.

Something went wrong. The ship landed. Excavation work began. Then, almost as if the planet were eating the ship and its crew, all disappeared beneath the surface. They were never contacted again
.

*   *   *

On earth the dominant art form was something called
cheomnaury.
This involved a blending and transformation of sensory inputs. The most favored sensory combinations were sound, odor, and flavor. The greatest
cheomnaurist
in the world was an Ecuadorian dwarf who found her way to the capital of Hai Brasil and obtained personal audience with Astrud do Muiscos herself
.

The dwarf began her performance with a presentation involving the sound of surf pounding upon the rocks of the Pacific coast where Andean granite plunges hundreds of feet into icy foam. This was blended with the warm, rich odor of chestnuts roasting over a charcoal brazier. To this the dwarf added the subtle flavor of ground coriander
.

Astrud do Muiscos was pleased
.

The dwarf proceeded to offer a blend of a synthesized voice such as might come from a living volcano, to which she added a scent of natron and olive unknown outside the secret embalming chamber of Egyptian temples six thousand years old, to which was added the flavor of the
spithrus locusta.
The
spithrus locusta
is a marine arachnid, the flavor of whose meat is to that of ordinary broiled lobster as is that of the lobster to a common crab louse
.

Astrud do Muiscos was very pleased
.

The triumph of the dwarf was a combination of white noise in the ordinary range of audibility with subtle sub- and supersonics, mixed with the odor of a quintessential coca extract and the flavor of concentrated formic acid drawn from Amazonian driver ants
.

Astrud do Muiscos named the dwarf her successor to the throne of Hai Brasil
.

The religion of the day, as appropriate to the climate of political realities, was a mutated form of the ancient Ishtar cult, with local variations as Ashtoroth, Astarte, and Aphrodite. There was even a sort of universal Mamacy, with its seat in ancient but restored Babylon
.

“I don’t see why it’s taken so long to get here, anyway,” Njord Freyr snapped.

“You mean from Pluto?” Shoten responded. “But we are on course. We are in free-fall. Look.” The cyberbiots superimposed a small box of course data beside the whirling diagram of the Yuggoth system.

“Not from Pluto!” Njord spat. “From earth! Why has it taken until 2337 to reach—Yuggoth? When space flight began almost as long ago as the era Sri Gomati babbles about. The first extraterrestrial landings took place in 1969. Mars thirty years later. Remember the stirring political slogan that we all learned as children, as children studying the history of our era?
Persons will set foot on another planet before the century ends!
That was the twentieth century, remember?”

“Every schoolchild knows,” Shoten affirmed wearily.

Gomati, recovered from the shock of Njord’s blow, spoke. “We could have been here two hundred years ago, Njord Freyr. But fools on earth lost heart. They began, and lost heart. They began again—and lost heart again. And again. Four times they set out, exploring the planets. Each time they lost heart, lost courage, lost interest. Were distracted by wars. Turned resources to nobler purposes.

“Humankind reached Mars as promised. And lost heart. Started once more under Shahar Shalim of the old New Maghreb. Reached Venus and Mercury. And lost heart. Reached the Asteroid Belt and the gas giants under Tanit Shadrapha of Ugarit. And lost heart.

“And now. At last. We are here.” She gestured with her flowing, waving tentacles toward the diagram that glowed against the ship’s dull fittings.

“What course, Shoten Binayakya?” she asked brusquely.

The whirling bodies on the screen were marked in red, the pulsing red of Yuggoth’s inner flames, the beating, reflected red of the madly dashing moons. A contrasting object appeared on the screen, the flattened cone-shape of the ship
Khons
, trailing in its wake as it wove among the bodies a line to show the course of its passage. Shortly the line had woven past, circled about, curved beyond each body in the diagram, leaving the stylized representation of
Khons
in perturbated circular orbit about the entire system.

“So,” purred Shoten Binayakya. And Sri Gomati and Njord Freyr in turn. “So.” “So.”

Shoten Binayakya flicked a pressure plate with some limb, some tool.
Khons
bucked, slithered, through a complex course correction. Shoten slapped another plate and the full exterior optics of
Khons
were activated; to the three members of the crew, hooked into the cyberbiotic system of the ship, it was as if they fell freely through the distantly star-sprayed night. Fell, fell toward red, glowing, pulsating Yuggoth and its family of gray dancing servants.

Khons
, inserted into its new flight path, sped first past the outermost of Yuggoth’s moons: a world of significant size. The ship’s sensors and cyberbiots reported on the body: in mass and diameter not far from the dimensions of the familiar rock-and-water satellites of the
outer planets. Close to five thousand kilometers through its center and marked with the nearly universal cratering of every solid world from Mercury to Pluto.

The twins, dubbed Thog and Thok by Gomati, whirled at the opposite extremes of their interwoven orbits, so
Khons
flitted past the innermost of the four moons, another apparent replica of the familiar Ganymede-Callisto-Titan-Triton model, then dropped into equatorial orbit about the dully glowing, oblate Yuggoth.

Njord, Gomati, Shoten Binayakya fell silent. The sounds of
Khons
’s automatic systems, the low hiss of recirculating air, the occasional hum or click of a servo, the slow breathing of Njord Freyr, of Sri Gomati, were the only sounds. (Shoten Binayakya’s lungs had been cybermeched, whirred softly, steadily within the metal torso.)

Once more a limb flicked at a pressure plate, moved this time by feel alone. The ship, fully visible to any hypothetical viewer outside its hull, was for practical purposes totally transparent to its crew. A circuit warmed instantly to life. Radiation sensors picked up the electrical field of the planet, converted it to audio range, broadcast it within
Khons
: a howl, a moan. With each pulsation of the planet’s ruddy illumination, the sound modulated through an obscene parody of some despairing sigh.

“If only Holst had known!” the synthesized voice of Shoten whispered. “If only he had known.”

Yuggoth’s surface sped beneath the ship, its terrible velocity of rotation making features slip away as others rushed toward the viewers, flashed beneath and dropped away, disappearing across the sprawling horizon into interstellar blackness. Great viscous plates of darkly glowing semisolid rock hundreds of kilometers across rolled and crashed majestically. Between them red-hot magma glowed bale-fully, great tongues of liquid rock licking upward between the pounding solid plates, the heat and brightness of the magma growing and lessening in a slow, steady rhythm that
Khons
’s cyberbiots and audio-scanners converted into a contrabass
throb-throb-throb-throb
.

“There can be no life there,” Njord Freyr announced. “Nothing could live in that environment. Nothing could ever have lived there.”

After a silence Sri Gomati challenged him. “The planet itself, Njord Freyr. Could it be a single organism? The sounds, the movement, the energy.” She raised her organic hand to her brow, ran scores of writhing digits from the browline above her glittering silver eyes, across her satiny naked skull to the base of her neck.

“It could be a nascent sun,” Shoten Binayakya whispered. “Were Jupiter larger, more energetic—you know it has been suggested that Jupiter is a failed attempt at the creation of a partner for Sol, that our
own solar system is an unsuccessful venture at the formation of a double star.”

“And Yuggoth?” Gomati dropped her tentacular hand to her lap.

Njord Freyr’s voice contained only a tincture of sarcasm. “Sent by some remote godling to undo Jupiter’s failure, hey? How do we know that it’s always been here? Before now we knew it existed at all only through courtesy of Neptune’s and Pluto’s perturbations. How do we know this Yuggoth isn’t a new arrival in the system? Nobody knew that Neptune or Pluto existed until a few centuries ago!”

“Or perhaps,” purred Shoten, “perhaps our system is a failed triple star. Ah, think of the show if we had three suns to light our worlds instead of one!”

Again Shoten Binayakya flicked at a pressure plate. Once more
Khons
shifted, jounced. There was a steady acceleration and the ship slid from its orbit around the ruddy pulsating planet, fell away from Yuggoth and toward the spinning worldlets that occupied the central orbit around the planet.

“They must be,” Gomati crooned softly, “they must be. Thog and Thok, Thog and Thok. How could he know, centuries past? Let some Curwen find the salts and let him tell!”

“You’re babbling again!” Njord almost shouted. “I thought we were selected for stability for this mission. How did you ever get past the screening?”

Distracted, Sri Gomati slowly dragged her fascinated gaze from the spinning moons, turned silver eyes toward Njord Freyr. “Somehow he knew,” she mumbled. Her lips drew back in a slow smile showing her bright steel monodonts. “And somehow we will find the Ghooric zone where the fungi blossom!”

As if in a trance she turned slowly away, leaned forward, eyes glittering metallically, leaned and reached her hands, the cyborged and the genetically custom-formed, as if to touch the two red-gray worldlets.

“He wrote horror stories,” Gomati said, her voice dead-level as if trance-ridden. “He wrote of an unknown outer planet that he called Yuggoth, and of others—Nithon, Zaman, Thog, and Thok—and of horrid, puffy beasts called shoggoths that splashed obscenely in the pools of the Ghooric zone.

“He died four hundred years ago today, Howard did. But first he wrote of one Curwen who could restore the dead if only he could obtain their essential salts. What he called their essential salts.” She paused and giggled. “Maybe he had a prevision of cloning!”

Open with a logo recognizable as representing world politics
.

The old century ended with a definite shift of world power. The westward movement of two millennia continued. Mesopotamia, Hellas, Italia, Franco-Germania, England, America. Now the power in America shifted from an Atlantic to a Pacific orientation
.

The new powers to contend with were Japan, China, Soviet Asia
.

Western Europe and the eastern United States lapsed into terminal decadence as loci of civilization. Europe from the Danube to the Urals passed from Habsburg and Romanoff glitter to a brief democratic flicker to a drab gray dusk as Soviet Europe and then into Slavic night. Like its predecessor of fifteen centuries, the Soviet Empire split in half; like the Western half of the predecessor, the Western Soviet Empire was overrun by barbarians. But it did not fall to the barbarians. Not really. It fell to its own internal rot. And like the eastern half of the predecessor, the Eastern Soviet Empire throve
.

By the hundredth anniversary of that death in the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital, the landmass of the earth eastward from the Urals to the Rockies came under unified government. It included dozens of half-forgotten countries. Tibet. Afghanistan. India. Laos. Australia. Tonga. The Philippines. Manchuria. Mongolia. California. Baja
.

It was called the Asia-Pacific Co-prosperity Sphere
.

Europe from the Urals to the English Channel became a peninsula of forests and farms. What small vigor remained was concentrated in the region from the Danube to the Urals. Slavic influence, walled off in the East by the great and burgeoning Asian renaissance, spread northward and westward. After a pause at the limits of a region running from the Scandinavian Peninsula to the Iberian, the Slavic Empire launched its rude invasion fleet. It crossed the English Channel. There was little resistance. The few defenders of British sovereignty, under the leadership of a fellow called Harald, were defeated at a place called Runnymede
.