Cthulhu's Reign

THE HOLOCAUST OF ECSTASY Brian Stableford

It was dark when Tremeloe first opened his eyes, and he found it impossible to make out anything in a sideways or upward direction. When he looked down, though, in the hope of seeing where he was standing — for he had no idea where he was, and was sure that he wasn’t lying down — he saw that there were holes in a floor that seemed to be a long way beneath him and that stars were shining through the holes.

There seemed to be a conversation going on around him, but there were no English words in it; the languages that the various voices were speaking all seemed to him to be Far Eastern in origin. The voices seemed quite calm, and in spite of the impenetrable darkness and not knowing where he was, Tremeloe felt oddly calm himself.

“Does anyone here speak English?” he asked. The words came out easily enough, but sounded and felt wrong, in some way that he couldn’t quite understand.

For a moment, there was a pregnant silence, as if everyone in the crowd were deciding whether to admit to speaking English. Finally, though, a voice that seemed to come from somewhere closer at hand than all the rest, said: “Yes. You’re American?” There was nothing Oriental about the accent, but that didn’t make it any easier to place.

Tremeloe thought that the other might be near enough to touch, and tried to reach out in the direction from which the voice had come, but he couldn’t. His body felt strange and wrong. He couldn’t feel his hands, and when he tried to touch himself to reassure himself that he was still there, he couldn’t touch any other part of him with his fingers. The idea struck him that the conviction that he wasn’t lying down, based on the fact that he couldn’t feel a surface on which he might be lying, would be unreliable if he were paralyzed from the neck down.

“Richard Tremeloe, Arkham, Massachusetts,” he said, by way of introduction. “Have I been in some kind of accident?” He tried to remember where he had been before falling asleep — or unconscious — and couldn’t. “I think I’ve got amnesia,” he added.

“More than you know,” said the other voice, a trifle dolefully, “but the others are a little more relevant in their concerns.”

“Can you understand what they’re saying?” Tremeloe asked, knowing that it was the wrong question, but reluctant to ask one whose answer might provoke the panic that he had so far been spared.

“Some of it,” the other boasted. “There’s an animated discussion about reincarnation going on. The Buddhists and the Hindus have different views on the subject, but none of them really believes in it — especially the ex-Communists. On the other hand. ”

“Who are you?” Tremeloe demanded, wondering why the anxiety that he ought to be feeling wasn’t making itself felt in his flesh or his voice. “Where the hell are we?”

“If I’m not much mistaken,” the other replied, “we’ve been reborn into the new era, beyond good and evil: the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. I’m not at all sure about the freedom, though. or, come to that, the ecstasy. I shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t be possible. The memory wipe should have made it impossible.”

“Reborn?” echoed Tremeloe. “I haven’t been reborn. I’m not sure of much, but I know I’m an adult. I’m fifty-six years old — maybe more, depending on the depth of the amnesia. I’m a professor of biology at Miskatonic University, married to Barbara, with two children, Stephen and Grace. ” He trailed off. He was talking in order to test his memory rather than to enlighten the mysteriously anonymous other, but it wasn’t an awareness of pointlessness or a failure of remembrance that had caused him to stop. It was the realization that the stars really were shining through gaps in. something that wasn’t the floor. “Why has up become down?” he asked. “Why aren’t I aware of being upside-down? Why can’t I feel gravity?”

The voice didn’t try to reassure him. Instead, the other said: “Miskatonic? Have you read the Necronomicon?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tremeloe snapped — or tried to, since his momentary irritation was a mere flicker, which didn’t show in his voice. “It’s been locked in a vault for decades. No one’s allowed to see or touch any of the so-called forbidden manuscripts, since the unpleasantness way back in the last century. Anyway, I’m a scientist. I don’t have any truck with occult rubbish like that.”

“Do you know Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee?”

That question gave Tremeloe pause for thought. He blinked and squinted — and was glad to know that he could still feel his eyelids, just as he could still feel the movements of his tongue — in the hope that he might be able to make out his surroundings now that his eyes were adapting to the extremely poor light. He couldn’t. Above his head — or, strictly speaking, below it, since he seemed to be hanging upside-down — the darkness was Stygian. Around him, he had a vague impression of rounded objects that might have been heads, not very densely clustered, and wispier things that were vaguely reminiscent of fern leaves, but he couldn’t actually see anything. except the fugitive stars, shining through gaps in what was presumably a dense cloud-bank. Occasionally, the stars were briefly eclipsed, as if something had moved across them: a giant bird, perhaps.

Around him, the chorus of foreign voice was still going on. If any of the others could speak English, they were content to listen to what Tremeloe and his companion were saying, without intervening.

What was remarkable about the other’s question, Tremeloe reminded himself, when he came back to it reluctantly, was that Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had died more than a hundred years ago. or, at least, more than a hundred years before Richard Tremeloe had turned fifty-six. He was long dead, but not quite forgotten. just as the university’s famous copy of the Necronomicon was unforgotten, even though no one had clapped eyes on it since before Tremeloe had been born. Having no idea how to answer the other’s question, Tremeloe prevaricated by saying: “Do you?”

“I did, briefly — but that was in another place and another time. I infer from your hesitation that he’s long dead, and that you. died. sometime in the twenty-first or twenty-second century.”

“I’m not dead,” Tremeloe retorted, reflexively, although he did realize that if all the other hanged men in this dark Tarot space were earnestly discussing reincarnation, he might be in the minority in holding that opinion, and might even be wrong, in spite of cogito ergo sum and all his memories of Miskatonic, Barbara, Stephen, Grace, his hands, his legs, and his heart.

His heart would have sunk, if he’d had one, and if its sinking had been possible. I can’t feel gravity, Tremeloe thought. Aloud, he said: “Are you telling me that I really have been reincarnated?”

“Yes — probably not for the first time, although it’s impossible to tell how many layers of amnesia we’ve been afflicted with.”

“How?” This time Tremeloe succeeded in snapping. “When? By whom?”

“If you’d read the Necronomicon,” the other voice replied, with a leaden dullness that probably wasn’t redolent with panic because it had no more capacity to hold an edge that Tremeloe’s own, “you’d know.”

“And you have?” Tremeloe riposted.

“No,” the other came back, quick as a flash. “I wrote it — and no, I don’t mean that I’m the legendary Arab with the nonsensical name who penned the Al Azif. I mean that I too, like Peaslee, have lived in Pnakotus. except that to me, it was a home of sorts, though not Yith itself, and I’m not supposed to be out of it any more. The human brain I inhabited for ten years was supposed to have been cleansed of every last trace of me. I shouldn’t have been available for. this.”

“Has it occurred to you,” Tremeloe asked, “that you might be barking mad?”

“Yes,” the other replied. “How about you?”

Good question, Tremeloe thought. This is a nightmare — a crazy nightmare. There’s no other explanation. Please can I wake up now? Somehow, he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He might well be dreaming, but he was very clearly conscious that he was living his dream, and that he was not going to be waking up to any other reality any time soon.

Even so.

“The cloud’s getting lighter,” he observed. “It is cloud, isn’t it? That is the sky, isn’t it? It only seems to be beneath us because we’re hanging upside-down.”

“Yes,” the other answered. “It’s dawn. Whether we’re barking mad or not, this might be a good time to strive with all our might to lose our minds completely: to dissolve our minds into private chaos and gibbering idiocy, if we can. On balance. ”

The other shut up, somewhat to Tremeloe’s relief.

The dawn was slow. The shades of grey through which the bulk of the sky progressed as its patches turned blue and the stars were drowned seemed infinite in their subtlety, but Tremeloe soon stopped watching them, in order to concentrate on the tree.

The reason that he couldn’t feel his body was that he didn’t have one. He was just a head and a neck — except that the neck was really a stalk, and it connected him to the bough of a tree from which he hung down like a fruit, amid a hundred other heads that he could see and probably a thousand that he couldn’t. The things he’s intuited as leaves really were leaves, and really were divided up in a quasi-fractal pattern, a little like fern leaves but lacier. They were pale green streaked with purple.

The tree, so far as Tremeloe could estimate, was at least a hundred feet high, and its crown had to be at least a hundred and fifty in diameter, but he was positioned on the outside of the crown, about five-sixths of the way up — or, as it seemed to him, down — and he couldn’t see the trunk at all. He could barely see the ground “above” his head, but the thin streaks he could see between his head-fruit-tree and the next were vivid green and suspiciously flat, as if they might be algae-clogged swamp-water rather than anything solid.

The jungle stretched as far as his eyes could see. The birds in the sky really did look like giants, but that might have been an error of perspective.

There was no disintegration into private chaos, no hectic slide into gibbering idiocy. While not exactly calm any longer, and perhaps still capable of a kind of panic, Tremeloe felt that his consciousness was clear, that his memory was sound — so far as it went — and that his intelligence was relentless. He realized that he was no longer possessed of the hormonal orchestra of old. Presumably, he still had a pituitary master gland, which was probably still sending out its chemical signals to the endocrine glands that had once been distributed through his frail human flesh, but whatever was responding to them now was a very different organism. From now on, his feelings, like his voice, would be regulated by a very different existential system. Even so, he did still have a voice. He had no lungs, but he did have vocal cords, and some kind of apparatus for pumping air into his neck-stalk. He wasn’t dumb, any more than he was deaf or blind.

All in all, he thought, only slightly amazed at his capacity to think it, things could be worse. Then he remembered what the other English-speaker had implied about losing his mind completely, and dissolving into gibbering mindlessness, probably being the better alternative.

The head of the other English-speaker — the only Caucasian face amid a crowd of Orientals who occasionally glanced at him sideways, with apparent curiosity but no hostility, but showed no sign of understanding what he said — seemed to be that of a man in his mid- fifties, who might have been handsome before middle-aged spread had given him jowls and thinning hair had turned his hairline into a ebbing tide. The jowls seemed oddly protuberant, but that was because they were hanging the wrong way. Gravity still existed; it was just that Tremeloe no longer had any sensation of his own weight. He felt slightly insulted by that, having always thought of his intellect-laden head as a ponderous entity.

Tremeloe didn’t see the bats until they actually arrived at the tree, wheeling around it in a flock that must have been thirty or thirty-five strong. This time, there was no possibility of any error of perspective; they were huge. Because Tremeloe was a biologist he knew that real vampire bats were tiny, and that the common habit of referring to fruit-bats as “vampire bats” was a myth-based error, but now that he was a human fruit, the difference seemed rather trivial — especially when he saw the bats begin to settle on his fellow human fruit.

Please, he prayed — although he was an atheist — don’t let it be me. Because he was a biologist, though, he took note of the fruit-bats’ eyes. The bats were obviously not nocturnal in their habits, so their eyes were adapted for day vision; these specimens were not as blind as bats even in their natural state — but that didn’t explain why the unnaturally huge creatures had eyes that looked almost human in their fox-like heads.

After a few seconds, during which he saw one creature’s needle-sharp teeth tear into the face of an Oriental man — who did not scream — Tremeloe was on the point of withdrawing the almost. but he never quite got there, because one of the bats suddenly descended upon him, as if out of nowhere.

He felt the monster’s breath on his cheek, caught its rancid stink in his nostrils, and looked into its not-quite-almost-human eyes, and knew that it was about to pluck out his own as it groped with its clawed feet. but then it was suddenly gone again, snatched away as abruptly as it had arrived.

After the bats had come the huge birds. and they really were huge. They were eagles, or condors, or something akin to both but not quite either. At any rate, they were raptors, and they numbered human- fruit-bats among their prey of choice. There weren’t as many birds as bats, so some of the bats were enabled to start their hasty meals in peace, but the birds were even fiercer, and they could easily carry a bat in each claw, so it wasn’t long before the bats fluttered away, seeking the cover of the sprawling crowns.

The raptors too, Tremeloe realized, as he watched his own avian savior fall into the sky, clutching for its next meal with its terrible talons, had unnaturally large eyes: not eyes like a hawk’s, but eyes like a man’s.

Tremeloe looked his white-faced neighbor in the eyes and said: “Is this hell?” He knew that it was a stupid question. He’d done much better before, when his not-quite-immediate response to the possibility that he had been reincarnated had been: how? By whom?

What the other said in reply, however, was: “That depends.”

A phrase that the mysterious other had used while they were still enclosed by merciful darkness floated back into Tremeloe’s mind: the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Except, the other had added, presumably knowing already that he was simply a head- fruit, there wasn’t much freedom in their present existential state. Nor ecstasy either, so far as I can tell, Tremeloe added, privately. Although it might have been more exciting, now that he thought about it, to be reincarnated as a human eagle. better, at any rate, than being reincarnated as a human fruit-bat.

Are we all vampires now?

But the real questions were still how and by whom?

“I’m not who I think I am, am I?” Tremeloe said to the other, who seemed to know a lot more than he did.

“I’m just some sort of replica, created from some sort of recording. This isn’t the twenty- first century, is it? This is a much later era — maybe the end of time. Is this the Omega Point? Is this the Omega Point Intelligence’s idea of a joke?”

“I wish it were,” the other replied. “Perhaps it is. but my suspicion is that it’s not as late as you think. The Coleopteran Era is a long way off as yet, alas. This is Cthulhu’s Reign. what the human race were designed to be and to become. But no, we’re not just replicas reproduced from some sort of recording; we’re actually who we think we are, shifted forwards in time. You are, at any rate. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t belong here. I only borrowed a human body temporarily, and then I returned to Pnakotus. I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t right.”

Tremeloe thought that he had just as much right to protest as the other, but his mind — which was not only refusing to dissolve into incoherent idiocy but perversely insistent on retaining an emotional state more reminiscent of complacency than abject terror — was oddly intent on trying to pick up the thread of the narrative that the other fruit-head was stubbornly not spelling out.

“Pnakotus,” he said. “That’s the mythical city in the Australian desert, where some of the so-called forbidden manuscripts were found. You really believe that’s where you’re from?” He paused momentarily before adding the key question: “When, exactly?”

“Two hundred million years before you were born,” the other replied. “But I seem to have been removed from the twenty-first century, where I spent ten years doing research. That memory was supposed to have been erased — not just blocked off, like some fraction of a computer hard disk whose supposed deletion is merely a matter of losing its address, but actually wiped clean. reformatted. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to live in Pnakotus for another hundred million years or more, and then migrate to the Coleopteran Era, in order to avoid all this. The Great Race of Yith are inhabitants of eternity. Chulthu and the star-spawn simply aren’t relevant to us. ”

There was a rustling on the bough from which Tremeloe’s head was hanging down, and he saw something moving behind the head that was talking to him. He couldn’t see its body, so it might have been a lizard, or a snake, or neither. but he could see its head, and its suddenly-gaping mouth, and its forked tongue, and its oh-so-human eyes.

However its body was formed, it had to be big: bigger than an anaconda. For a moment, Tremeloe thought that he was about to lose the only entity in this bizarre world that was capable of holding a conversation with him — that the un-man from Pnakotus was about to be swallowed whole by the monster — but then the leaves moved. The leaves were clever, it seemed, and surprisingly strong, given their apparent delicacy. They flipped the stealthy predator into the air, and it fell, crashing through the branches, seemingly moving up and up but actually tumbling down and down. until it hit the boggy surface with a glutinous semi-splash.

It was invisible by then, but when Tremeloe looked at the green streaks that were visible between the crowns of his trees and its neighbors, he saw multiple movements, as if creatures akin to crocodiles were homing in on the splash, in anticipation of a feast. He could not see the crocodiles’ eyes and more than he could distinguish their bodies, but he did not doubt that they would be human.

As hells go, he thought, it’s not so bad to be a human-head-fruit, given that we have such defenders to prevent our being stolen and eaten. As a biologist, however, he knew full well that the whole purpose of a fruit is to be eaten, and thus deduced that if he really were being defended, the purpose of that defense might only be to preserve him for the preferred fructicarnivore. except, of course, that he was not a seed-bearing entity at all, but a mind-bearing entity, which might or might not change the logic of the situation completely.

He suddenly remembered a line that everyone at Miskatonic knew, supposedly quoted — in translation, of course — from the mysterious Necronomicon: “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu lies sleeping.” There was a fragment of verse, too, which ended “that is not dead which can eternal lie,” but the relevant point seemed to be, if the un-man from Pnakotus could be taken seriously — which was surely necessary in a world where madness no longer seemed to be possible — that dead Cthulhu was no longer asleep, but awake, and that his awakening had changed the world out of all recognition, maybe not overnight, but rapidly. and purposefully.

“What did you mean,” Tremeloe said to his companion, “this is what the human race was designed to be and to become?”

“Just that,” the other replied. “That was why Cthulhu and the star-spawn came to Earth: to produce and shape humankind. The raw material was rather unpromising when they first arrived, and seemed to be headed for insect domination, but they’re patient by nature, and we saw immediately what the results of their project would be, at least in the shorter term. They didn’t bother us — just worked alongside us for tens of millions of years. Ours was a parallel project, after all. They create, we record — we’re complementary species. They seemed to be leaving us alone, just as we left them alone. although I always had my suspicions about the flying polyps. Maybe this is what they always intended, for all of us. except that we already know that we escaped to the belated Coleopteran Era after the Polyp Armageddon. We were only ever present in spirit in the Human Era. We never interfered, except to observe and record — for our own purposes, of course. Nothing was supposed to leak out. Maybe that’s why Cthulhu took against us, although I can’t imagine how the garbled rubbish that found its way from our records into Al Azif and its various supposed translations could have interfered with the star-spawn’s plans for shaping human intelligence.”

Tremeloe had only the vaguest notion of who — or what — Cthulhu and the star-spawn were supposed to be, even though everyone at Miskatonic knew the basics of what was, in effect, the university’s own native folklore. “As I remember it,” he said to his companion, “this Cthulhu character was supposed to be a sort of giant invisible octopus, which came to Earth from another star, and whose eventual resurrection after a long dormancy on the ocean bed was supposed to bring about the end of the world as we knew it. You’re saying that he’s real, and it’s actually happened?”

“It’s difficult to describe Cthulhu in terms of shape and substance,” the other replied, with a calmness that now seemed rather ominous. “He’s primarily a dark matter entity. You know that ninety per cent of the universe’s mass is non-baryonic, right? That it interacts with your sort of matter gravitationally, but not electromagnetically? Well, Cthulhu, the star-spawn, and most of the other life-forms in the universe are essentially dark matter beings, although they can transform themselves wholly or partly into baryonic matter when conditions are right and the whim takes them. Don’t ask me what counts as right or wrong in that context — we Yithians can move our minds in space and time via hyperbaryonic pathways, but we’re not creative. Exactly what the relationship is between Cthulhu’s kind, matter and mind, we don’t know — but they’re certainly interested in them, simply because they are creative. Why they create, and how they select their creative ends, I literally can’t imagine, but the simple fact is that Cthulhu spent hundreds of millions of years shaping the ancestors of human beings, partly in order to produce the kind of intelligence that my kind can borrow — but that was only a means, not an end.”

“And this is the end?”

“Possibly. It’s just as likely to be another phase in the grand plan, requiring something more than evolution by selection. The various cultists who decided, on the basis of leaked Pnakotic lore, that Cthulhu and his hyperbaryonic kindred are gods, looked forward to his return as a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom — a time when humankind would be freed from its self-imposed moral shackles and taught new ways to revel in violence and slaughter — but that was mostly wishful thinking.”

Tremeloe thought about fruit with human brains, and eagles and crocodiles with human eyes, and extrapolated that imagery to the notion of an entire ecosphere in which human intelligence had been redistributed on a profligate scale, in order that human mentality might experience all of nature red in tooth and claw in all its horror and glory. and the notion of a “holocaust of ecstasy and freedom” no longer seemed so alien. As an individual, he was certainly not free, nor had he tasted anything akin to ecstasy as yet, but if one tried to see the situation from without, as a single vast pattern.

“Are humans like the one I used to be extinct now?” he asked. “Has the harvest of minds taken place, so that all individual personalities could be relocated?”

“Probably not,” replied the un- man who should not, in his own estimation, ever have been reduced to a mere fruit. “So far as our explorers could tell, original-model humans, living in societies of various sorts, lasted long into the intellectual diaspora. although they soon became as opaque to our technology of possession as entities like this. We only have a vague idea of the interim between the era a few millennia down the line from the time that you and I recall and the advent of the Coleopteran Migration.”

There really might be things, Tremeloe thought, harking back to the Necronomicon again, that man was not meant to know. Would I be better off on a tree where I had no language in common with any of my fellow fruit? Would I be better off trying to account for the situation by the force of my own unaided intellect, rather than listening to this bizarre lunacy? Except that it can’t be mere lunacy, unless there are spoiled fruit here as well as healthy ones, whose sanity is being eaten away from within by mindworms.

He quite liked the idea of mindworms, although he knew that it ought to have frightened him. His “liking” was purely aesthetic, so far as he could tell. He thought that he was capable of feeling pleasure, just as he was probably capable of feeling panic, but his new hormonal orchestra was obviously in a quiet mood at present, tranquilizing his brain chemistry more efficiently than the intrinsically horrific thoughts he was formulating therein were disturbing it. If that remained the case, then his situation would surely be better than bearable and more akin to a heaven than a hell.

It would probably be painful if any bat ever got to bite into him or any snake were to swallow him whole, but while he remained safe, successfully protected by the leaves that surrounded him — whose photosynthesis was presumable producing the blood that nourished his flesh and thoughts alike — and the eagles who fed upon the bats, he was feeling no physical pain and no particular mental anguish. If his fate was to suffer eternal inertia, with no idle hands for with the Devil might make work, he thought that he might be able to cope — and since it was now proven that he could be reincarnated, perhaps he had an infinite and infinitely various future to look forward to, in which he would have abundant opportunity to fly and to swim, to squirm and to walk, always knowing that even if pain and death were to arrive, however hideous they might be on a temporary basis, there would be other lives to come: times to rest and times to ponder, times to eat as well as to be eaten.

Or was it, he wondered, merely his reduced capacity to feel such emotions as horror and terror that made the future seem so promising? Might he, in fact, be better off as a gibbering wreck, consumed from within by mindworms, his very consciousness reduced to immaterial dust?

The invisible sun was climbing behind the cloud-sheet. Eventually, it began to rain. The drops seemed tropically large, but when they splashed on his chin and his cheeks the liquid explosions were more pleasurable than painful, and the moisture was welcome. The shower didn’t last long. When it stopped the cloud was much lighter and thinner. Rapid shadows occasionally fluttered across Tremeloe’s face, but no bats or birds came close to him. The eagles patrolling the sky were drifting lazily in slow circles.

“I know that you never expected to be here,” Tremeloe said to his companion, “and that you’d rather be snug and warm in Pnakotus, dreaming of one day becoming a beetle, but this really isn’t as bad as all that, is it?”

“I don’t know,” the other replied, “and not knowing is something that my kind aren’t used to. I shouldn’t be here. I’ve borrowed humanity in the past, for research purposes, but I’m not human. I wasn’t designed for this. It’s not my fate. You’re a prisoner of time, so you can’t begin to understand how Yithians think, any more than I can begin to imagine how Cthulhu and the star-spawn might think, but believe me when I say that this is wrong.”

Tremeloe did believe him, after a fashion, but he couldn’t sympathize. If all the silly rumors about Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee were actually true, and the professor’s body really had been taken over by an alien time-traveler for several years way back in the 1900s, then the alien time-travelers in question evidently didn’t observe the principle of informed consent, and could hardly complain if the tables were turned on them. They had poked their noses into human affairs, and had no right to bleat that they were only reporters, not creators, as if that somehow let them off the moral hook. except, of course, that the human world had moved beyond good and evil now, into an era when morality no longer had hooks, or claws, or censorious staring eyes.

Tremeloe remembered the bat’s eyes then and the eagle’s. No, they hadn’t been censorious, or even judgmental — but he felt sure that they had been more than merely avid. There had been something in them that was more than mere sight or mere appetite, which might well have been “beyond good and evil,” but held an emotion that was by no means entirely free of dread.

I’m just a head-fruit hanging on a tree, Tremeloe thought. The birds and the crocodiles still have animal bodies and animal hormones. Perhaps I have the best of it, in this far-from-the-best of all possible worlds. but if the cycle goes on forever, I’ll have it again and again and again, ad infinitum.

Such was the comforting positive nature of that thought that he did not notice that the sky had become even bluer until the murmur of mostly incomprehensible voices altered him to the fact that something was going on.

At first, he thought that the cloud was simply clearing, its remnants evaporated by the hot tropical sun that was ascending towards its zenith — but then he saw the bloated sun drift free of the brilliant white clouds to take possession of the sky, and saw that its flames were redder and angrier than he had ever known them before.

It really is much later than either of us thought, he said to himself, but then doubted the judgment, as he realized that the excessive blueness of the unclouded sky and the excessive redness of the sun were both optical illusions, caused by the fact that the sky was full of creatures; creatures that were not quite invisible, although they had to be made of something other than the kind of matter with which he was familiar: something so alien as to be almost beyond perception. The big birds were flying far away with rapid wing-beats.

Tremeloe was conscious of gravity now, although it did not seem to be tugging him in the direction of the green earth, but in the direction of the alien sky, whose no-longer-kindly light hid all the multitudinous stars of the incredibly, unimaginably vast universe within its dazzling glory. “What are they?” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

The other heard him. “Star-spawn,” he replied. “If you could see them, the impression of shape they’d give you would be much like Cthulhu’s, on a much smaller scale: vaguely cephalopodan, with a scaly tegument and oddly tiny wings that shouldn’t work but do.”

Somehow, Tremeloe grasped what the other meant by “the impression of shape.” The star-spawn had mass, but their matter was utterly alien, obedient to different rules of dimension and form, whose relationship with the kind of matter making up his own flesh and that of the tree of which he was now a part, was essentially mysterious. and far, far beyond mere matters of good and evil.

The raptors were nowhere to be seen now. If their existential role was to protect the trees of human life and their heady harvest from giant bats, they had played their allotted parts and made their exit until the next day.

But it’s not yet noon, Tremeloe thought, wishing perversely that he were capable of terror, in order that he might feel a little more human, a little more himself. Even mayflies live for a day.

He had been a biologist, though, during his larval stage, and he knew that mayflies actually lived much longer than a day, even though their imago stage was a brief airborne climax to a life spent wallowing in mud. He knew, too, that from a detached scientific viewpoint, every mayfly had a living ancestry that stretched back through their larval stages and generation after generation of evolving living creatures, all the way back to some primordial protoplasmic blob, or some not-yet-living helical carbonic thread. Only its climax was ephemeral, and by comparison with the billion years it had taken to produce the fly, there was hardly any difference at all between an hour, a day, and fifty-six years.

Beyond good and evil, Tremeloe knew, human philosophers held that there ought to be a world in which good would no longer be refined by the absence of evil — of pain, of hunger, of thirst, and so on — but in positive terms, in terms of an active, experienced good whose mere absence would replace outdated redundant evil. But the good and evil that he had now moved beyond wasn’t human good and evil at all, and the speculations of human philosophers were only relevant to it insofar as they had helped to shape his own consciousness, his own expectations, and his own intellectual flavor.

The good that the world embraced now was something essentially alien, and neither Tremeloe nor any of his fellow human fruit — nor even the reluctant Yithian refugee from legendary Pnatokus — had any words or the slightest imagination with which to describe or get to grips with it.

As the star-spawn descended to enjoy the crop that had been hundreds of millions of years in the creative shaping, and mere hours in the final ripening, Tremeloe still had time enough to realize that his new hormonal orchestra, quiet until now, was not unequipped with sensations akin to horror and terror, agony and fury. and to appreciate the irony of the fact that those sensations too, just as much as his thoughts, his memories and his knowledge and consciousness of history and progress, of space and time, of matter and light, and most especially of strangeness, were all elements of a nutritive and gustatory experience that something so very like him as to be near- identical would have to relive time and time again, from the wrong perspective, if not ad infinitum, then at least until the star-spawn had finally had their fill, and had abandoned earth to the long-delayed Coleopteran Era.

The star-spawn fed, like patient gourmets, and the blazing sun moved on in its patient arc, heading for a sunset that Tremeloe would not see. this time. He ran the gamut of his new emotions, reacting with his thoughts and his imagination as best he could, even though he wished, resentfully, that he was disinclined to do anything different.

There was a long future still ahead of him, but even that would merely be an eye-blink in the history of the New Eden that earth had become. Eventually, the multi-tentacled monsters of dark matter would pass on to pastures new, nature would reassert itself, and the primal wilderness would return.

The only thing we were ever able to deduce about the mind of the God who was in charge of Creation before Cthulhu arrived, Tremeloe reflected, with obliging but slightly piquant serenity, as the matter comprising his delectable freshness was chewed, absorbed, and digested without his ever quite losing consciousness, is that he must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. And perhaps he had good taste.