A story inspired by Lovecraft, part two.

Just a quick note - this is not something that I've written. This story was published in Chrysalis in 1977 and was authored by Richard A. Lupoff. I'm merely transcribing it for my blog readers to give a sense of what I get out of Lovecraft's work. Namely, an incredible sense of atmosphere and indescribable sense of weirdness, usually topped with an ending that's less than satisfying and, indeed, often lame.

As intended, since Lovecraft's collected letters (he was a volumous correspondant) indicate that he felt that man (in the collective human sense, not the gender) and man's awareness were a local phenomena and didn't apply to the rest of what we laughingly refer to as reality.

No, I didn't write this, but I wish I had. About the best I've managed is a little bit of atmosphere when I infrequently run roleplaying games, but even there I've been easily trumped. One of the singlemost fantastic pieces of atmosphere I've ever encountered in a game took place over five hours set in four rooms and a hallway. Oddly enough, the theme was vaguely Lovecraftian (Call of Cthulhu variant). The dude running it could tell a story, let me tell you.

That said, read on:

MARCH 15, 2337

"Not yet," Shoten Binayakya's voice clattered.

"Soon," Gomati countered. She hooked into Khons's radar sensor, letting cyborged biots convert incoming pulses into pseudovisuals. "Look!" she exclaimed. "It's a whole system!"

Nyjord Freyr stirred, determined to pull his attention away from frustration, direct it toward a topic that would involve. "There, there," he heard Gomati's voice, not sure whether it was organic or synthesized, "shift your imput to ultra-v!"

Njord, hooking into Khons's external sensors, complied.

"Astounding!"

"Yet so."

"Not unprecedented. On the contrary," Shoten Binajakya interjected. "All the giants have complex systems of moons. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. Search your memory banks if you don't recall."

Surlily, Njord sped unnecessary inquirt to an implanted cyberbiot. "Mmh," he grunted. "So. Almost thirty significant satellites among them. Plus the trash. So." He nodded.

"And this new giant - ?"

"Not new," Njord corrected. "It's been there all along, as long as any of the others. You know the old Laplace notion of elder planets and younger planets was abandoned about the same time as the solid atom and the flat earth."

"Good work, Freyr," Shoten shot sarcastically.

"Well then?"

Sri Gomait said, "Clearly, Njord, Shoten meant newly discovered." She pause for a fraction of a second. "And about to be newly visited."

Njord breathed a sigh of annoyance. "Well. And that old European, what's-his-name, Galapagos saw the major moons of Jupiter seven hundred years ago. All the others followed as soon as the optical telescope was developed. They didn't even need radiation sensors, no less probes to find them. Seven hundred years."

"Seven hundred twenty-seven, Njord." Sri Gomati petted him gently on his genitals.

"You and your obsession with ancient history! I don't see how you qualified for this mission, Gomati, always chasing after obscure theorizers and writers!"

"It's hardly an obsession. Galileo was one of the key figures in the history of science. And he found the four big Jovian moons in 1610. It's simple arithmetic to subtract that from 2337 and get seven-two-seven. I didn't even have to call on a cyberbiot to compute that, Njord dear."

"Argh!" The flesh remnants in Njord's face grew hot.

Shoten Binayakya interrupted the argument. "There it comes into visual range!" he exclaimed. "After these centuries, the perturbations of Uranus and Neptune solved at last. Planet X!"

Njord sneered. "You have a great predilection for the melodramatic, Shoten! Planet X, indeed!"

"Why," Shoten laughed, the sound fully synthesized, "it's a happy coincidence, Njord dear. Lowell applied the term to his mystery planet, meaning X the unknown. Until Tombaugh found it and named it Pluto. But now it is not only X the unknown but also X the tenth planet as well. Very neat!"

Njord began a reply but paused as the distant planet became visible through Khons's sensors. It was indeed a system like those of the inner giant planets, and radar sensings pouring through Khons's external devices, filtered and processed by cyberbiotic brains, overwhelmed his own consciousness.

A great dark body swam through the blackness, reflecting almost no light from the distant sun but glowing darkly, menacingly, pulsating in slow heartbeatlike waves, with a low crimson radiance that pained Njord subliminally even through the ship's mechanisms and the processing of the cyberbiots. Fascinated yet repelled, Njord stared at the glowing, pulsing globe.

About its obscene oblateness whirled a family of smaller bodies, themselves apparently dim and lifeless, yet illuminated by the raking sinister tone of their parent.

"Yuggoth," Sri Gomati's low whisper jolted Njord from his reverie. "Yuggoth," and again, "Yuggoth!"

Njord snapped, "What's that?"

"Yuggoth," repeated Sri Gomati.

The male hissed in annoyance, watched the great pulsating bulk loom larger in Khons's external sensors, watched its family of moons, themselves behaving like toy planets in orbit around the glowing body's miniature sun.

"The great world must be Yuggoth," Sri Gomati crooned. "And the lesser ones Nithon, Zaman; the whirling pair - see them, see! - Thog and its twin Thok with the foul lake where puffed shoggoths splash."

"Do you know what she is raving about?" Njord demanded of Shoten Binayakya, but Shoten only shook that ambivalent satiny head, two silvery eyes shimmering, stainless steel upper and lower monodont revealed by drawn-back organic lips.

Khons's remote sensors had accumulated enough data now, the ship's cyberbiots computed and reduced the inputs, to provide a set of readouts on the new planetary grouping's characteristics. Shoten raised a telescoping cyberimplant and pointed toward a glowing screen where data crept slowly from top to bottom.

"See," the ambiguous, synthesized voice purled, "the planet's mass is gigantic. Double that of Jupiter. As great as six hundred earths! More oblate even than Jupiter also - what is its spin?" Shoten paused while more lines of information crept onto the screen. "Its rotation is even shorter than Jupiter's. Its surface speed must be -" He paused and sent a command through the ship's neurocyber network, grinned at the response that appeared on the screen.

"Think of resting on the surface of that planet and whirling about at eighty thousand kilometers an hour!"

Njord Freyr rose from his rest-couch. In fact the least extensively cyborged of the three, he retained three of his original organic limbs. He pulled himself around, using Khons's interior freefall handholds to steady himself, hooked his strongly servomeched arm through two handholds and gestured angrily from Shoten to Sri Gomati.

"We can all read the screens. I asked what this Eurasian bitch was babbling about!"

"Now, dear," Shoten Binayakya purred ambiguously.

Sri Gomati's shimmering silvery eyes seemed for once not totally masked, but fixed on some distant vision. Her hands - one fitted with an array of scientific and mechnical implements, the other implanted with a multitude of flexible cartilaginous organs equally suited for technical manipulation and erotic excesses - wove and fluttered before her face. She spoke as much to herself or to some absent, invisible entity as to Njord Freyr or Shoten Binayakya. It was as if she instructed the batches of cyberbiotic brains that populated the electronic network of the ship.

"March 15, 2337, earth standard time," she crooned. "It would please him. It would please him to know that he is remembered. That he was right in his own day. But how, I wonder, could he have known? Did he merely guess? Was he in contact with entities from beyond? Beings from this strange, grey world past the starry void, this pale, shadowy land?"

"Dead four hundred years this day, Howard, does your dust lie in ancient ground still? Could some later Curwen not have raised your essential salts?"

"Madness!" Njord Freyr broke in. With his organic hand he struck Gomati's face, his palm rebounding from the hard bone and the harder metal implanted beneath her flesh.

Her glittering eyes aflash, she jerked her head away, at the same time twisting to fix him with her angry glare. A circuit of tension sprang into being between them, lips of both writhing, faces animated in mute quarrel. Beyond this, neither moved.

Only the interruption of Shoten Binayakya's commanding speech broke the tense immobility. "While you carried out your spat, dears, I had the cyberbiots plot our orbit through the new system."

"The system of Yuggoth," Gomati reiterated.

"As you wish."

The data screen went to abstract blogs for fractions of a second, then it was filled with a glowing diagram of the new system: the oblate pulsating planet, its scabrous surfacte features whirling in the center of the screen; the smaller rocky moons revolving rapidly about their master.

"We can land only once," Shoten purred. "We must carefully select our touchdown point. Then later expeditions may explore further. But if we choose poorly, the worlds may abandon this Yuggoth" - Gomati's name for the great planet was spoken sardonically - "forever." Shoten's cyborged head nodded in self-affirmation, then the synthesized words were repeated, "Yes, forever."

-----

15032137 - READOUT

The Asia-Pacific Co-prosperity Sphere continued to evolve. It was, beyond question, the center of world power, economic development, political leadership. It was also a gigantic realm sprawling across continents and oceans, including scores of great cities and billions of citizens.

Its first city was Beijing. Secondary centers of authority were established in Lhasa, Bombay, Mandalay, Quezon City, Adelaide, Christchurc, Santa Ana.

The first great leader of the Sphere, Vo Tran Quoc, had become a figure of legendary proportions within a century of his death. Schools contended as to his true identity. Despite his name, he was no Vietnamese. That much was known. One group of scholars held that he was a Maori. Anoter, that he was an Ainu. A third, that he was a Bengali woman, the product of rape during the war of independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan, posing as a man (or possibly having undergone a sex-change operation involving the grafting of a donated penis and tested).

At any rate, Vo Tran Quoc died.

In the wake of his death a struggle broke out. Some who contended for the power of the dead leader did so on the basic of purely personal ambition. Others, from ideological conviction. The great ideological dispute of the year 2137 dealt with the proper interpretation of an ancient political dictum.

The ancient political dictum was: Just as there is not a single thing in the world without a dual nature, so imperialism and all reactionaries have a dual nature - they are real tigers and paper tigers at the same time.

While political theorists in Beijing quarreled over the meaning of this political dictum, a new force arose with its center in the eldritch city of Angkor Wat deep in the jungles of old Cambodia. The new political force broght about a world feminist order. Its leader, following the example of Vo Tran Quoc, took the name of a mything personage from another culture than her own.

She proclaimed a New Khmer Empire stretching from the Urals to the Rockies.

She took the name Vidya Devi. This means goddess of wisdom.

The former Slavic domain and the Maghreb suffered rivalry that led, after a century, to convergence and ultimate amalgamation. The old Roman Empire was reborn. It included all of Europe, the Near East, Africa, and North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. (Niagara Falls now poured its waters dicrectly into the ocean; the former west bank of the Hudson River was choice seashore property. The Rockies overlooded pounding waves that stretched to the Asian shore.)

The empire was ruled by an absolute monarch under the tutelage of the world feminist order. She was known as the Empress Fortuna Pales I.

Latin America, from Tierra del Fuego to the southern bank of the Rio Grande (but excluding Baja), was the greater Hai Brasil. The empress claimed pure Bourbon ancestry. Her name was Astrud do Muiscos.

In the Antarctic a great land-reclamation project had been undertaken. Geothermal power was used to melt the ice in a circle centered on the south pole. The cleared area measured 1.5 million square kilometers. The soil was found to be incredibly rich in minerals. It was hugely fertile. The scenic beauty of the region was incomparable. There were mountains, lakes, glaciers, to shame those of New Zealand or Switzerland or Tibet. Forests were planted and grew rapidly and luxuriantly. Important wildlife throve. The few native species - penguins, amphibian mammals, a strange variety of bird newly discovered and named the tekeli-li - were protected.

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 amitious 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 woud 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 plent were eating the ship and its crew, all disappeared beneat 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 Equadorian 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 dward proceeded to offer a blend of a synthesized voice such sa 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 truimph 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 anscient Ishtar cult, with local variations as Ashtoroth, Astarte, and Aphrodite. There was even a sort of universal Mamacy, with its seat in ancint but restored Babylon.