Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods (10 page)

In simple, flat sentences, the creature had undone all that Caldwell believed, and condemned all that he loved. He should rage, he should go insane, and yet he could only feel a dim, hollow echo of regret. “We got it wrong, then. We all got it wrong…”

Your species’ naïve misinterpretation of the cultivation and harvest cycle was the most useful and benign method of preparing you for your purpose.

“Our… purpose?”

Set down in a garden, you multiply and advance at a monitored rate, digesting raw resources until the indigenous biosphere collapses and environmental conditions become optimal for our colonization. Surviving catalyst specimens are harvested and transplanted…

Optimal conditions? He scoffed at the bitter irony, but then the creatures did seem to inhabit a toxic stew… “You’ve known about us? You could have come down and contacted us at any time…?”

We oversaw cultivation of your world for two million Terran solar years. Ancestors/mother colonies were far too cautious. By transplanting your species to an unripe world, we will take possession in less than ten centuries.

Words and breath failed him. They could’ve saved us… but we were serving them, all along. All our pollution was not the by-product of progress, but the purpose itself… not of ruining the earth, but cultivating it, to make it perfect for them.

“And now you’re taking over the Earth?”

Taking it over? As your race understands ownership… it was always ours.

The insect horde whispered on even as it placed his body inside a coffin and sealed it. The toxic vapors were vacuumed out, the temperature dropped and a skeleton crew of insects converged on his ears and eyes.

Be fruitful and multiply, they said.

They ordered him to SLEEP and FORGET in his own voice and tore any conscious thoughts of his own to shreds, but he hurled himself against the walls to smash them, and dug his fingers into his ears and sinuses until the last squirming body was smashed.

His ears thrummed white noise and his head pounded, but when drugged sleep finally claimed him, he felt possessed by a fierce exultation that kept his horror and despair at bay.

A second chance!

They were being taken to another planet, a virgin world, a new Eden, to start again. They would never make the same mistakes––

*
         
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*

He awoke with the sun blazing down full on his face.

He rolled over and stretched, wiped the crust of sleep from his eyes, and marveled at the flawless aquamarine sky. His mind still drowsed under a fuzzy blanket of warm euphoria that he didn’t entirely trust, but could not resist.

One of his ears gave only a dull thrum like the sound of distant crickets, but the other, though clogged with waxy exoskeletons, clearly brought him the sound of men and women singing.

He lay upon a broad, flat outcrop of burgundy lava rock on the edge of a placid green sea. The beach was a narrow strip of powdered sugar crowded by towering trees with white trunks and deep red bladed leaves.

A fat, balding man dripping sweat came out of the trees. When he saw Caldwell, he beamed and threw out his arms to embrace him, then caught him when he knocked him down.

“Hallelujah, brother! Blessings unto Jesus!” His thick Texas accent acutely reminded Caldwell of home, and everything that had gone wrong there.

The singing came from the forest. Caldwell steadied himself against the Texan’s sturdy bulk. “How many people are there?”

“About a hundred or so, and mostly Americans… Awful lot of Chinese, which struck me funny, tell you the truth… I expected a whole lot more from my parish. We just woke up on the beach, and well, here we are! There could be more of us scattered all over. The angels said there would be other groups, but for now, we should make a home, and be fruitful––”

“They weren’t angels,” Caldwell said.

The preacher’s tight, too-bright smile silently warned Caldwell that he was hanging on to sanity by his fingernails. This wasn’t what anyone expected. It must’ve been a crushing blow, not to awaken on a cotton-candy cloud with dove-white wings and a harp.

Caldwell followed the preacher into the trees. They must’ve been up for hours, and they hadn’t wasted any time.

Singing and speaking in tongues, the men chopped down trees, while the women stoned the flightless, six-winged bird-things that flapped honking out of the crimson foliage, and gathered their jeweled eggs in nests shaped like shopping bags.

“We found the lava rocks were almost ready-made axe heads, so we got a heck of a head-start chopping down a clearing, and our boys say we can dam up the stream nearby and have a sawmill… There’s iron ore and oil just oozing up out of the ground.”

“You think this is Paradise… and you’re just going to plow it under and burn it down, just like the last one?” Caldwell could not keep the edge of hysteria out of his ragged voice.

The Texan fanned his ruddy face with a bleeding leaf. “I don’t presume to question His means or ends, brother. I know the Bible is the Lord’s gospel truth and I don’t mean to cast stones at His divine plan, but I don’t believe Adam and Eve ever had it half as easy as we’re going to. Praise Jesus!”

Caldwell drew in a breath to shout, and it almost came out of him before he even felt it building… the desperate cry of his soul, to stop and look at themselves and the second chance they’d been given. He almost told them the truth about their angels.

But when he looked around, he saw no one who did not join in the hymns and glossolalia. Not a single member of his group. Just good God-fearing folks, chopping out their little piece of the new Eden.

At first, Caldwell only moved his lips so as not to stand out, but it didn’t take long to learn the words.

And by then, he was swinging an axe.

by Joshua Reynolds

Oily rain wept down from the black sky and sizzled where it struck the rusty catwalks. Occasionally, a bolt of lightning would shriek down and dance across the iron shields that protected the upper reaches of the city and for a moment, the darkness would be swept aside in a flash of painful brilliance.

Despite the rain and the lightning, the walkways and catwalks were choked with people as the city went about its business. Impromptu markets sprang into existence as merchants of all stripes and legitimacies hawked their recycled wares to the dull-eyed populace. They sold protective amulets and powdered ancestors; dreams of protection and safety, though everyone knew the truth of it.

The city was humanity’s last stand and outside of its walls, old things raged and fought in an entropic cacophony that had engulfed the rest of the world one mind at a time. The Old Ones had taught mankind new ways to shout and kill and revel in the doing so, and all of the Earth was burning in a holocaust of madness and freedom.

But not in the Empire; not in the last city of a once-proud race. There was order beneath the Iron Curtain. There was order and safety, of sorts, even if it was all the more cruel than the chaos outside because it could be taken away.

Eliza Whateley knew all about that. Soshe ran, her albino skin going the color of basalt and her pink eyes the color of the far stars. It wasn’t just the hues that were changing, but the shape of her pupils and her bones, the latter shifting and cracking quietly whenever she tried to catch a few precious moments of sleep.

The horns had been first; twin nodules of calcified bone, poking up through her crinkly hair. They had grown so fast and become so heavy that she had been forced to keep her head covered by her rain-hood even on the rare dry days. Then her toes had stuck and grown into curved cloven hooves so that when she ran, she made a sound unlike anything anyone in the city had ever heard before, except in nightmares.

She was running now, her hood tossed back, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. She gripped balance cables and rail-wires, hauling her aching body along, out into the burning rain and through the packed crowd. Curses and other querulous noises filled her ears as she shoved through the crowd, her hooves stomping on feet, her elbows digging into kidneys, hips, and shoulders.

Someone made a grab for her. Fingers tangled in her unwashed hair and she whirled, cocking her head and gouging at the offending hand with her horns. The owner of the hand screamed and suddenly the entirety of the crowd turned on her like an injured beast. Blindly, she fought back. She was stronger now than she had been, her muscles moving beneath her gape-pored flesh like pistons.

“Get away from me!” she shrieked, wrenching a struggling shape – man or woman, she couldn’t tell – into the air and hurled it into a flickering neon sign. The sign exploded into a shower of multi-colored sparks and there was a smell like burnt pork. The crowd’s fury faded, replaced by fear. The tide drew back, leaving her alone in the center of the catwalk.

Breathing heavily, she looked around, peering through a curtain of hair. Her changed eyes making everything seem hazy and odd. “Get away,” she said, more quietly. Her voice had changed as well, becoming rougher and yet somehow more feminine. Her breasts heaved and her hips ached, though whether from the posture forced upon her by her hooves or something else, she couldn’t say. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

That was a lie. She did want to hurt them, to stamp them to paste beneath her mighty hooves and dance on their bones. It was in her to hurt them; she had been bred for pain, her gene-stock curdled and soured with the milk of the Old Ones. Whateley 65-A, the most changed, the most infected, the most tested. Even more than Marsh 12-C or Jermyn 6-13, the Whateley stock was a potent brew. Hardy and strong, that was how they had described her, the men in the white butchers’ smocks with their lilting accents. Hardy and strong, a new breed of person capable of surviving... what?

She had not remained long enough to find out.

A loud hum filled the air and her palms flew to her ears. She jerked her head up, glaring around her, trying to spot the tell-tale ripple that would reveal the location of her pursuers. Out of the meeting point of two walls, a thin trickle of mist met the rain and turned to sludge. Time seemed to slow as she watched the thing behind the mist force itself out of a point no wider than an eyelash. The
Tind’losi
had found her.

It was said that they could follow a scent through time and space, being things of raw geometry and sentient mathematics rather than meat and bone. Artificial alchemical intelligences made of numbers and hate. They said the Empress Tsan-Chan, in her cosmic cruelty, had wrought them into being with ceremonies of abstract pain and untold consequence; that she had made them in her corkscrew palace to be her harbingers into the past. Hunters for the raw life-stuff needed to keep the ever-dwindling genetic pool of the remnants of the human race vibrant and functioning. They stalked the corridors of time, dragging back those who would not be missed in the centuries past to the endpoint of time where they were used and discarded, drained to keep the vampire-earth spinning for one more generation.

The hound was a canine grotesquery, bubble muscles under squirming flesh that pulsed with a thousand colors, draped over long, rubbery bones. Teeth like jagged shrapnel spun in a triangular maw and eyes the color of urine glared at her with single-minded determination.

They had followed her soul-musk through the angles and shadows. Now, they had come to drag her back to the Pnakoticopticon, to the tests and the chemicals and the men in butchers’ smocks with their brass hands and syringe tipped fingers. Back to be torn open and tested and finally broken down back into the
ubosathla
to be re-grown and retested again and again until they were satisfied.

She knew this because she remembered it. She remembered it in the coruscating spiral of her genetic code; she remembered each birth and death as if it were her own. She remembered Wilbur and Lavinia and Zebulon and Agatha and Herbert and Spiro and all the other Whateleys, each one more Eliza than the last, until she had been born and had begun to become herself, complete and whole. Whateley-Prime was what they had called her and she knew that they were right. Just as she’d known that she had to escape, the way every Whateley tried to escape. To try to reach safety and the outside.

That they had sent the hounds only proved that she had been correct. In her head, the phantom voices of the others murmured in bitter satisfaction. The hounds had not come for
them
, after all. No, for them it had been the Empress’ guards in their beetle-armor with their E-Sign tipped shock poles. But if she was the best of them, she also had the most to lose.

“No,” she hissed, flexing her own talons. They had come after the hooves and she was grateful for them now as the hound squatted on its haunches and gave a sub-sonic bay, signaling the rest of its pack. “No! I’m not going back!”

The hound leapt, its body undulating across the distance between them like smoke. She swiped at it, scattering its substance, but it merely reformed behind her. Luminescent drool dripped from its mouth and splattered onto the catwalk with acidic effect. It lunged again. She sprang onto the rail to avoid it and then leaped out over the void.

The city spun beneath her as she crashed into a parallel catwalk slightly below the one she’d just vacated. People were screaming now, and someone had pressed an alarm. Eliza hauled herself up onto the catwalk, her heart hammering. People pressed away from her, making the E-Sign with contorted, trembling fingers, trying to ward her off. She snarled at them and tossed her horns. She hated them so much, with their wide mouths and round eyes. They gaped at her stupidly, like blind fish in a bowl. She wasn’t like them. With her piebald skin and beast-muscle, she was better. Superior. She could survive anything!

Pain spiked through her a second later and she spun. The hound’s teeth crashed together, inches from her face. Raw mathematics washed over her, stinking of imaginary numbers and poisonous formulas. She clawed wildly at it and it dispersed with a ghastly chuckle. Her soul felt shriveled and ragged in her chest; she screamed in frustration, her hoof slamming down and shaking the catwalk. People howled in fright and tried to flee to the street platforms.

More hounds raced along the electrical wires and catwalk rails like mirages made flesh, blinking in and out of existence as they closed in on her from all sides. She looked down... she could risk a jump. She was stronger now. A fall into the sub-streets might not kill her. But it would trap her. She looked up, where the edges of the curtain stretched in vain towards each other.

She could go up, but... up meant out, outside of the curtain and outside the city. Outside was where the Old Ones capered and crawled, rending the world. The thought chilled her and thrilled her. The part of her that was Whateley, the part of her that was black and cloven-hoofed, wanted to go up and out, to join the Old Ones Outside. But the other part of her, scared albino Eliza, wanted to run down and hide in the dark until the hounds found her at the last. That was what it meant to be human, after all: to run and cower in the dark.

In the end, it was no choice at all. She leapt straight up as the hounds closed in. Her claws dug into the iron and her palms blistered from the touch of the symbols carved into the metal-warding sigils and secret marks culled from the lost libraries of Pnakotus and Irem and patched together into a protective blanket by the Empress Tsan-Chan. The sigils held back the madness outside, and kept the dwindling ranks of Man safe in a womb of magic and metal. But they would only hold for so long.

That was why they had created her and her kind, she knew. Wilbur and the others whispered the truth of it in her ears. It was why the Empress had scoured the Earth in those savage final days, hunting for the gene-stock of those who already had contact with Those on the Threshold.

Her hooves struck iron and trailed sparks as she climbed with simian speed. Wilbur had been a climber. She had memories of places long lost now: a rotting farm house and a ring of stones. Genetic memories embedded in her thoughts like instincts. All the Whateleys knew these places and dreamed of them. They dreamed of other things too, things that cried out for divine parents in lonely places.

Did she have a twin out there? A long-lost uncle or aunt, invisible and inhuman. A thing of alien proportions and familiar scents. It would be nice if that were so. Her only family now were the ones she had in her head. There were multitudes in her, but she was only one. But if she could just escape. Just get outside...

Below her, the hounds began to scale the Curtain, their fluid shapes not quite touching its surface. The symbols were anathema to them just as much as they were to her. She hissed in pain as she tried to speed up. Her muscles were cramping, though from effort or from the poison in the symbols, she couldn’t say.

Ethereal claws scraped through her leg and a scream wrenched from her throat. She nearly lost her grip but managed to hold on, if only barely. Snarling, she grabbed one of the plates of the Curtain and yanked it free. Steam and foul vapor rose from between her fingers, but she ignored the pain and swung the plate – and the sigil decorating it – at the hound as it slithered towards her.

The beast exploded with a yelp, bursting into flickering motes that drifted down like ash. Eliza chucked the plate at another hound; it sprang aside desperately. The howls changed timbre, becoming mournful and cautious. The hounds kept their distance now, pacing through the air, growling at her. Her hand ached abominably and she resisted the urge to look at it. Instead, she began to ascend once more, albeit one-handed.

The sky above was infinite shades of blue and streaked with a web of shivering lightning. Vast, amorphous shapes drifted across the limits of her far-sight. She shuddered on a cellular level at the thunder of their passing and she wanted to cry out to them, to say
take me with you
, but she could only lower her head and climb, the hounds nipping at her hooves. They could not hear her, not behind the Curtain. But outside...

The hounds closed in on her, growling and frothing. They were enraged now, the numbers under their flesh spinning and flashing. Other things gathered, slinking down the curve of the Curtain. Iron spiders with pulsing tubes and eerily glowing glass eyes clambered to meet her and contain her. Like the Curtain, the spiders were covered in runes and oaths. The Empress’ automatons, built with her own gilded talons. Powered by the thought patterns of the mind-skins contained within the halls of Pnakotus, they were the city’s first line of defense, its greatest protectors. They were metal golems with the souls of heroes, hierophants, and sorcerers from Earth’s better epochs.

They haunted her nightmares and the nightmares of her other selves. Even more than the hounds, they terrified her. She swung out from the Curtain, avoiding the closest spider as it galloped towards her, claws clicking. Her hooves scraped sparks off of its back and she jumped higher.

Her ascent was roughly halted and she was slammed face-first into the Curtain, her teeth rattling in her jaw from the force of the impact. Just above the spider’s head a hologram splashed to life and hovered like a demented halo. A familiar face looked at her sadly.

“Is this what we have come to?” the Empress Tsan-Chan said, her thin, lined face twisting with a snake’s grief. “This? A clattering, cunning black brat? A goat-girl with more Outside than In?” The spider’s talons buzzed as they punctured her shoulder and thigh, pinning her painfully to the Curtain. The other automatons began to gather, and beyond them, the hounds hovered watchfully. Eliza looked past the hologram, towards the twisted shape of the Empress’ corkscrew towers, rising above the rat warren of the city. The Empress was there, sealed inside of shell of Valusian magics and advanced technologies. The Empress was always there, watching every corner of her city, every inch of the curtain, watching like a matron searching for vermin. She watched and made sure that mankind remained human. Untainted. Unless it served her purpose.