Future Lovecraft (21 page)

Abeni wrenched herself free. She stumbled to the decking, hands smacking the metal before her shoulder could. She sucked in a breath and startled when she felt a hand touch her shoulder. She rolled toward the wall, expecting the shadow man, but it was a different man who stood there, the merchant Esmail, whom she slowly recognized. Abeni took his hand and pulled herself up.

“Little Mother, are you well?”

Her eyes moved past him, to the shadows that coated the walls of Aphelion Station. “I am not,” she said, seeing no reason to deny it. She was not well and neither was her station, but she wondered how both might be so, again.

“You speak in riddles, Abeni,” Esmail said, after she told him of Bolanle, of the nutmegs, of the writhing darkness. She could not make better sense of all that she had seen, did not know how to stop what she felt coming. “You speak of things that are not so. These shadows do not move and nutmegs are but nutmegs.”

The worst thing of it, Abeni decided, was not Esmail disbelieving her. It was that she longed for the things the shadow man had shown her. She wanted these creatures to come through Aphelion Station and make their mark upon it. How wonderful a discovery these great and terrible things. This corner of the universe had never seen their like. The curious child within Abeni responded to that, wanted to see these creatures in the light of the sun, wanted—

No. What she wanted did not matter. She could not allow it. Would not. “Esmail, I need your help,” she said. “I need the containers of your ship and the compost of this station.”

The shadow man said it would not matter, but Abeni moved forward, anyhow, claiming one cargo bay for her experiment. Sunlit grain, she wanted a forest of sunlit grain. She would have to make do with nutmegs and so, did, planting all that she had in the malodorous compost the engineers gave her with mocking smiles. They thought she had finally lost her mind, for nutmegs were not grown this way. The horticulturists told her the same, insisting she come to their deck to see how they did their work—one must splice, one must graft!—but no. Abeni paid to house her experiment within one of the cargo holds and waited, ignoring everyone who told her she was wrong.

As the hold began to warm over the coming days, Abeni wondered if perhaps she was wrong after all, but something within her said to keep on. Never had she heard such an insistent voice and so, she tended the nutmegs as she might children, often forgetting her normal duties as she walked among the growing trees. This could not be so, the arborists said, walking down the neatly planted rows; how could these poor nutmegs be growing as they were? Abeni did not know, but watched as they soared upward and reached for the ceiling with its artificial sunlight streaming downward.

Harvest, and Abeni welcomed those who would see what she had grown. Esmail came to help her gather the nutmegs and it was he who opened the first of the pods to reveal the spice inside. Thus, it was Esmail who suffered the first horror as the creature unwound itself from the nutmeg and crawled out of the pod, latching onto the nearest arm. It was, after all, hungry, Abeni supposed.

The creature was a thing she had seen in the writhing darkness, a dozen lashing limbs and one hungering mouth. As it suckled at Esmail’s arm, he staggered backward. Below his moan, the cracking of other pods was heard within the cargo hold. Beneath Abeni’s feet, the decking rumbled. She moved to the doors, knowing then that Aphelion was lost. All that it had been, gone. Her mistake. Her vain hope. She pushed the arborists into the main docking ring, sealing the cargo hold with herself and Esmail inside. All around them, pods broke open, creatures writhing to escape their confines.

And then, the shadow man came and laughed in Abeni’s ear as he wrapped his arms around her. Abeni leaned back in his embrace, wanting to let these creatures out, wanting to show them to the world, and yet -

“Told you, there will still be the water,” the shadow man whispered.

She thought,
Oh, but I miss the sunlight.
“Let the water come.”

The shadow man flooded the compartment with his warm, oil-slick water. Abeni felt herself float upward, amid the creatures who swam and seemed to grow within the disagreeable water. They moved effortlessly, bobbing and darting, swarming over what remained of Esmail, drifting closer to Abeni and the shadow man. She pressed closer to him, into his darkness and beyond.

“Sweet Mother,” he whispered—and then his eyes flew wide.

Abeni had reached beyond him, to the control panel, where slick fingers skimmed to vent the compartment. Water and creatures alike were blown outward, into the abyss beyond Aphelion Station, into the darkness between the stars. Abeni felt the shadow man release her, felt his scream as his children died, amid boiling water which then exploded in a shower of ice. Did it snow between the stars? That day, it did.

And Abeni...Abeni reached until she could reach no more, and dreamed she felt sunlight trailing over her cheeks, her throat, and into the hollow of her fish-marked palm.

for J., as always

DARK OF THE MOON

By James S. Dorr

James Dorr
has published two collections with Dark Regions Press,
Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance
and
Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret
, and has a book of poetry about vampirism,
Vamps (A Retrospective)
, that came out this August from Sam’s Dot Publishing. Other work has appeared in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
,
New Mystery
,
Science Fiction Review
,
Fantastic
,
Dark Wisdom
,
Gothic.Net
,
Chi-Zine
,
Enigmatic Tales
(UK),
Faeries
(France), and numerous anthologies. Dorr is an active member of SFWA and HWA, an Anthony and Darrell finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a multi-time listee in
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
. Up-to-date information on Dorr is at: http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.

“HOUSTON,” THE VOICE crackled, “we’ve completed our separation. We’re starting our descent to Tsiolkovsky now.” Tasha monitored the transmission, only half-glancing at the flickering control panel screen as she fired her own rockets. She didn’t need to follow it word for word, anymore than she needed to check the adjacent monitor’s feed from Earth, with its pre-dawn view of the Moon’s hair-thin crescent—the dark of the Moon—just above the horizon to know, more than anyone else, what was happening. The voice was that of Gyorgi, her husband.

“Commander Sarimov, we read you in Houston. All systems A-OK?”

“Gyorgi Sarimov here. Yes, Houston. Tsiolkovsky’s below us, brighter than Tycho on your Earthside. Its central mountain—you’ll see for yourselves once Natasha has brought her C.M. to a higher orbit. Meanwhile, to north, we can see the Sun glinting off the peaks of the Soviet Mountains while, southeast of us, Jules Verne Crater, the Sea of Dreams....”

Tasha heard NASA’s reply, mostly lost in static, perhaps a result of her shifting orbits, or, more likely, because the Command Module that she now piloted alone was itself passing behind the Moon. It would store the pictures that Gyorgi sent to it, waiting until it passed once more into sight of the Earth, where she could transmit them to the International Space Station and, thence, to Houston. But, for now, she could still hear Gyorgi’s voice.

She shut her eyes. Listened.

...Fancies such as these were not the sole possessors of my brain. Horrors of a nature most stern and most appalling would too frequently obtrude themselves upon my mind, and shake the innermost depths of my soul....

Why had she thought that?

She thought, instead, of when she had first met Gyorgi, at what they then called the Baykonur Cosmodrome, over tea at the enlisted men’s mess. She was, technically, a civilian and he still in training, so that the officer’s sector was barred to them. Back when the U.S.S.R. still existed.

Such horrors as she herself had experienced that dark night, when she’d felt a loneliness such as she felt now—separated from her then-future husband, with nothing that she could do. The night of the accident.

And then she chuckled. Gyorgi had found the words now to speak to her, perhaps just in a whisper over the uplink. For her ears only. And Gyorgi remembered. He quoted to her, not the words that she had thought during the accident nor words of his own, but those of an American author, Edgar Allan Poe, from a story she’d shown him in Florida after he’d started his training with NASA.

The story had had to do with a balloonist who’d gone to the Moon.

***

When she began the transmission again, she already knew of the Lunar Module’s safe landing, of Gyorgi’s careful step out onto Tsiolkovsky’s smooth floor. She had seen, as if through his eyes, the other two follow: one man American, one a Frenchman. There would have been another American, too, in orbit in the C.M., had he not taken ill just before their launch window. She had been a last-minute substitute for him. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself still on Earth, standing outside in the dim, winter air to watch the nearly invisible Moon rise, where she
would
be, had it not been for Gyorgi’s powers of persuasion. And she thought that, in the imagination of another Frenchman, not far from where she and her husband had lifted off scarcely four days before, other lunar cosmonauts had launched themselves in a shell from a huge gun.

So many authors, and not just Americans and Frenchmen, had been enamoured of the Moon for centuries. Even the namesake of her husband’s landing site, their own Tsiolkovsky, had written among his scholarly papers a novel,
Outside the Earth
. Others, too—Oberth, Goddard, the Englishman H.G. Wells—wrote fact and fiction about lunar travel or travel to planets beyond the Moon. Or, in the case of Wells and another American, Lovecraft, of alien beings beyond the Moon, who, turning the premise on its head, came to Earth to do evil.

Horrors most stern and most appalling....

Tasha shuddered. As if Mankind couldn’t do evil enough itself.

She thought of Russia. Its people. Its sorrows. Its myths, also, though they, like the Western science-fictional myths filled with their own wonder, had helped bring her and her husband together.

And now
he
had landed, part of the first expedition to the Moon’s far side. The side that was dark when you could look up and see the Moon—always faced out to space. And light when you couldn’t, so that now, when the Moon was hidden from Earth, Gyorgi had light by which to explore.

“...We’re setting the cameras now on the crater floor.” This she brought up on the C.M. monitor to watch for herself, to compare the camera eye “reality” with such deeper truths as her mind’s eye might show her, again almost as if she might see through
his
eyes. So well did she knew her husband, by now, and his way with descriptions.

And she saw a graveyard....

***

Her mind snapped back to the Baykonur Cosmodrome. To a metal table and glasses of hot tea. “You,” Gyorgi had said, “you know the myths, too, then?”

“Yes,” she answered. “The Sun and the Moon. The stars their children. You, Cosmonaut-in-Training Sarimov, brought up in Krasnoyarsk”—they’d known each other that well by then—“are the image of Dazhbog, of the Sun.”

He chuckled. She gazed at his sun-bright hair—her own was pale-brown, at best its dim shadow—as he smiled and answered, “Then you, Mechanical Engineer Tasha, must be that strangely named beauty ‘Myesyats’. Named as a man, yet entirely a woman, the Goddess-Moon.” He chuckled again. “You know, they were married.”

She blushed. By then, they
had
slept together, but still...talk of marriage? She frowned as she answered, “True. They were married. But then he abandoned her.”

Gyorgi laughed. “Yes. But the following springtime.... “

And then, a week later, he
did
leave her, though not by his own choice. The KGB was still to be feared then and when, one evening, he didn’t show up with the others at the mess, she imagined the worst. She knew what he had been trying to do for her, to get her into the cosmonaut program. Fearing, to be sure, that as an engineer, she might at any time be re-assigned to some other location, something she didn’t wish to happen, either. But she knew, too, that, while Gyorgi had a way with his superiors, a way of usually wheedling successfully what he asked for, one could not push the system too far before it would push back.

And that was when she’d found out how much she really loved him.

***

“Houston, do you read? The cameras are working, but possibly, we’ve made a miscalculation. We’ve set down on the southern side of Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, since that’s where the ground seemed the smoothest, but as a result, our landing site is in shadow. Perhaps in a few days, when the sun has shifted somewhat....”

She watched the pictures on the TV monitor and saw what Gyorgi meant. When they turned away from the mountain they were to explore, she could see the far crater wall, brilliant in sunlight, and the L.M. itself, where it sat on its landing struts, half-lit, half-shadowed.

But back toward the mountain, the strange, jagged peak that, so the scientists said, could only mean that Tsiolkovsky itself was an impact crater—and what an impact, the scar it left nearly three times as wide as the Earthside’s most prominent feature, Tycho!—back that way, all that the cameras could pick up was darkness.

She
looked
through Gyorgi’s eyes....

Darkness. A jumble. Shadow and darkness—the realm of Chernobog. And yet, in the darkness, this side of the mountain, what looked like small hillocks, yet pointed and craggy.

“The central peak’s children?” she whispered, half to herself. Realising, of course, that even if she were trying to contact him, Gyorgi, outside the L.M., couldn’t hear her.

She watched as if through his eyes, as if her sight, too, were confined by his helmet as he and the others peered into the darkness.

The hills were still far away from the L.M. and the men wouldn’t go to them until the next morning—Earth morning, that was, after they’d had another sleep period. Yet, they
did
look a little like gravestones.

Huge, sharp gravestones, patterned in rows. And between them—did she see what Gyorgi
really
saw?—what could almost be mist if the moon had an atmosphere.

Shadow and darkness. Her thoughts went back once more to that evening in Baykonur, when all her inquiries about Gyorgi had turned up nothing. She’d lain in bed in her room that night, claiming she felt ill, and tried to concentrate on Gyorgi.

She thought of the Sun and the Moon and their mythic love—the cause of the seasons. Dazhbog and Myesyats. Thought of their quarrels that, so the myths claimed, also gave birth to earthquakes. Dazhbog’s abandonment of his Moon-Bride every winter, but—here, she concentrated the hardest—his coming back each spring. And....

She joked about it afterward, saying it must have been the special sensitivity of her Russian woman’s soul. Or perhaps just stress. But she
had
seen it.

...the vision...

...white walls. An accident ward in a rural hospital outside of Baykonur, where Gyorgi had crashed his motorcycle. The doctors had not yet informed the officials—or, rather, as her vision widened, she realised they
had
told the Cosmodrome’s commandant, but, although she’d asked, he had not told
her.

The shadow. The brightness. The earlier myths of primeval Man, of evil and goodness. Chernobog and Byelobog, gods of the Dark and Light. Light of truth, withheld even when she had asked....

Gyorgi had come back the following morning, little the worse for wear. And, of course, what she thought she had seen could have been a coincidence—she knew he drove too fast. She had even argued with him about it. But in the meantime, she’d made two decisions. The first was to officially ask for a transfer to the cosmonaut program, to become a cosmonaut-in-training. This, she knew, was what Gyorgi had wanted, but up to this moment, she had always held back.

And the other, when Gyorgi was better, was to insist that they get married.

***

She lay on her couch, remembering now, while, on the moon’s far side, Gyorgi was sleeping. She had read the Western myths. Fantasy. Science fiction. Books she had purchased to read, alone, in the Florida nights while Gyorgi had been away on training.

She knew about training, and nights spent alone, even after her and Gyorgi’s marriage. Even though, by then, she was a cosmonaut, too, “to follow in the footsteps of Tereshkova,” as her husband had put it to those in command, there still was no question of her being actually sent into space, herself. Even Valentina Tereshkova had been a symbol, making that one flight in 1963, but, as a woman, thereafter perpetually grounded—so, too, her own job had continued to be primarily that of a mechanic.

But then the Soviet Union collapsed and they’d moved again, first to Luga, where her family came from—here,
she
could find work, whereas he was idle—and then to America, as a package with the great
Energia
rockets that NASA had bought from the Russian Republic, to help in the rebirth of its Moon program.

And while Gyorgi learned the ins and outs of American space capsules, Tasha had read Western authors and wondered. She’d wondered at all the authors’ obsessions with reaching the Moon. For all, it seemed the ultimate mystery, especially its dark side. And even, for some, it seemed also the key to a deeper mystery.

The Russian myths, before the Sun and Moon, spoke of gods of light and shadow. Of Byelobog and Chernobog. She wondered if Lovecraft had known the Russian myths—

Why had she thought of H.P. Lovecraft? Rather than Verne or Poe or the others?—yet, surely he had known, if not directly, as surely they all had. His vision sharper, perhaps, in some respects, just as the others’ was sharper in others. It was her belief that all human thought was ultimately based on identical truth, on some all-but-forgotten memory of Mankind.

Yet, the myths were, at base, simply metaphor. The evil of shadow was surely
Man’s
evil. That she believed, too. Just as the
Energia
rocket was her metaphor-child—she and Gyorgi had proved unable to have their own children, despite the myth-union of Dazhbog and Myesyats spawning the stars. But she’d helped assemble the
Energia
on its new American launchpad, so Gyorgi could ride it, and then, when Captain Brechner came down with the flu and she was assigned to the C.M. in his place, they
both
could ride it....

The ship to the Moon’s far side—
through
its darkness. Opening mysteries to reach to the stars beyond, past the planets, stars shrouded, yet burning bright in their own darkness. The children of Sun and Moon.

God and Goddess, one in the other.