Cthulhu's Reign

NOTHING PERSONAL Richard A. Lupoff

The flashes on the surface of Yuggoth were so brilliant that they shorted out every bit of electronic equipment on Beijing 11–11. Dr. Chen Jing-quo was the sole occupant of the observation satellite at the time, and her own eyes were spared only through a lucky break. She had been showering when the flashes occurred, sealed off from the outer universe.

Still, she had a devil of time extricating herself from the shower-stall, now that the fractional horsepower motor that rolled the door open and shut as well as the touch-sensitive keypad that controlled the motor were dead.

Dr. Chen found the manual override control by touch, got the door open, slipped into a jumpsuit and made her way to one of Beijing 11–11’s visual ports. The series of flashes had caused the ports’ photosensitive intracoating to darken dramatically. Dr. Chen stared at Yuggoth, a pulsing, oblate globe that filled the sky above Beijing 11–11. She studied the planet’s surface and the flashes briefly; she intuited that the observatory’s electron telescopes would be useless. Fortunately the station was also fitted with an array of old-style optical telescopes. Dr. Chen made her way to one of these, a 500- millimeter Zeiss-Asahi model, and trained it upon the site of the most recent flashes.

The flashes continued. Dr. Chen, at first alarmed and confused by the unexpected events, was regaining her calm. She focused the Zeiss- Asahi on the apparent epicenter of the flashes and was rewarded by the sight of another flash. This time she observed a bright dot moving away from the surface of the planet. It flashed away into the black trans-Neptunian space, toward the tiny, distant jewel that she knew was the sun. She followed the brilliant dot as long as she could. When it disappeared from sight she set about repairing the assaulted electronics of Beijing 11–11.

As soon as she could she set up a hyper- lightspeed link with her superiors on earth’s moon. As she did, she trained one of Beijing 11–11’s powerful electron telescopes on Yuggoth’s surface. She knew the planet’s cities as well as — no, better than — she knew the cities of Earth. She had been born on the mother world but her recollections of the planet were only the vague images of a small child. Colors and sounds and odors. The feeling of her mother’s arms, a flavor that she thought was that of her mother’s milk. But she could not be sure.

She had been selected as a toddler and transported to the moon for two decades of training. She had emerged at the top of her class, triumphing in the final competitive examinations over a thousand young men and women who competed for positions in the world’s ongoing scientific enterprises.

She had worked with joyous dedication on Beijing 11–11 for the past decade, observing the enigmatic activities on Yuggoth. That huge planet and its four satellites, Nithan, Zaman, Thog, and Thok, rolled eternally in a counterplanar orbit, crossing the plane of the solar ecliptic only once in a thousand years. No wonder it had gone undiscovered for so long, for earthbound planetary astronomers had long concentrated their studies on the multi-billion-mile disk that surrounded Sol, containing the four rocky planets, the four gas giants, the asteroids and plutoids and the countless meteors and comets.

Barely a century ago, Yuggoth and its moons had actually crossed the plane of the ecliptic, and thus it had been detected at last. The discovery of a new major planet had sent shockwaves through the scientific community of earth. Probes had landed on the major solid bodies of the solar system, the four rock planets and the solid moons of the four gas giants. The variety of worlds was incredible. There were ice-covered bodies, volcanoes, nitrogen seas, mountain ranges and deserts and canyon-like beds of ancient rivers, long run dry.

Above all, there was life and the evidence of past life. Exobiologists on earth had long given hope of such discoveries. Their mantra: where life can exist, it does! The flaw in their argument lay in the fact that they had only a single model from which to draw their conclusion. True, life flourished in the most astonishing of environments, in water close to boiling, in fissures deep within the earth, on ocean floors where pressure reached tons per square centimeter and where neither sunlight nor oxygen could be detected. But it was possible — it was vigorously debated — that life had originated but once upon earth, and that all organisms, however varied their natures and locales, were descended from a single ancestor.

It took the exploration of dozens of moons to find jungles and prairies, natural gardens of unimaginable colors and forms, schools of swimming things that were surely not fish, and flocks of flying things that were anything but birds.

But no people. Not merely no humans like those whose robot explorers first landed on Callisto and Mimas, Miranda and Proteus and Galatea and all the others. The people of Earth both longed for and feared the discovery of alien intelligences, whether they looked like giant grasshoppers or self-conscious cabbages or whales with hands, whether they wrote epic treatises on the meaning of life or built machines to carry them across the dimensional barrier to other universes even stranger than the one from which they had come.

No people. No intelligent cabbages or whales with hands, no ancient cities to put the monuments of Thebes to shame and to make the mysteries of Rapa Nui and Stonehenge and the riddle of Linear B look like child’s play.

Until Yuggoth.

Until the first robotic probe had circled Yuggoth, sending back to Earth images of structures that were undoubtedly artificial, yet that resembled no city ever built upon earth. They stretched for thousands of miles across the ruddy, pulsing surface of Yuggoth. They rose for hundreds of miles into the roiling, cloudy atmosphere of the planet. At the poles of the monstrous globe, black, glossy areas that must be ice caps reflected the light of a billion distant stars.

At this distance from the sun the amount of heat and light from that star was infinitesimal. Clearly, Yuggoth’s ruddy pulsations emanated from within the planet, whether the product of radioactivity, of tidal or magnetic forces, or of some other source of unfathomable nature.

Controllers on Earth — for this was before the construction and orbiting of Chen Jing-kuo’s observation station — tried sending messages to the occupants of those cyclopean cities, relaying them from their own base of operations on Luna to the satellites orbiting the gigantic “new” planet. There was no response.

Were the Yuggothi extinct? Were their cities like the dead cities of Angkor Wat and Yucatan?

But the satellites detected movement on the surface of Yuggoth. Great creatures of alien configuration, beings like nothing encountered on Earth or any other world of the solar system, moved between the buildings, between structures that had to be considered buildings, of those cities, which had to be considered cities.

Chen Jing-quo observed the Yuggothi with both electronic and optical instruments. They had heads and bodies and limbs. To that extent they resembled familiar species found both on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. But where one might have expected to see facial features, the Yuggothi showed clusters of waving, polypoidal tentacular growths. Their limbs were tipped with vicious-looking claws, and on their backs were what appeared to be vestigial bat-like wings.

They were hairless, their skin of a scaly composition that suggested a onetime marine origin, and indeed Yuggoth was covered in part with dark regions that appeared to be composed of a black, viscid liquid. If these were the seas and oceans of Yuggoth, the winged creatures might have evolved in their depths, using their wings to “fly” through the seas as earthly manta rays “flew” through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea.

Once Beijing 11–11 was launched from its construction site on Luna, it was piloted to the Oort Cloud by a two-member crew comprising Chen Jing-quo and Kimana Hasani. When Beijing 11–11 settled into orbit around the ruddy pulsing oblate form of Yuggoth, Kimana Hasani informed Chen Jing-quo that he was going to take one of the station’s EEPs for a closer look at the new planet.

Dr. Chen protested. Beijing 11–11 carried only a limited number of EEPs — External Excursion Pods. They were meant to be used only in cases of extreme necessity. For servicing and repairs of the station, for transportation between space vehicles — although there were no other space vehicles within the better part of a billion miles of Beijing 11–11 — or as lifeboats. They were emphatically not intended for exploration.

But Kimana Hasani would not be deterred. He suited up in protective gear and entered the EEP. He promised Chen Jing-quo that he would maintain a continuous video and audio link with Beijing 11–11. Once he had climbed into the EEP he waited for the interlock to click green, hit the launch button and dropped away from Beijing 11–11.

Dr. Chen watched twin video screens. On one she followed the progress of her partner’s EEP as it dropped away from Beijing 11–11 and drifted down toward the atmosphere of Yuggoth. On the other she watched Kimana Hasani’s face. He in turn concentrated on the instruments and controls of the pod.

As the tiny craft entered the atmosphere of the planet, Chen Jing-quo heard her partner mutter something, but this phase lasted only a few seconds. She thought she heard Kimana Hasani say something like sizzling, heard him speak part of her name. Then she observed a flash. The screen that had carried Kimana Hasani’s image went blank. The screen that had carried an exterior image of the EEP flared a brilliant golden-orange. A shock wave spread visibly through the atmosphere where the EEP had been, then rippled outward and downward toward the surface of Yuggoth.

And upward, toward Beijing 11–11, where Dr. Chen cried out in startlement and grief at what she had seen, and at what she suspected was its meaning.

The only phenomenon that she could think of that would produce so violent a discharge was a nuclear explosion. She knew the design of the EEP as she knew every surface, every weld, every circuit on Beijing 11–11. She knew that Kimana Hasani’s pod carried no fissile material. She inferred what had happened: the atmosphere of Yuggoth was composed of SeeTee matter.

SeeTee. CT. ContraTerrene. Antimatter.

She experienced a flash of recollection, from her school days of a student joke: what do you get if a normal matter boy makes it with an antimatter girl?

Answer: no matter.

No matter. No matter, in truth. Just one hell of a release of pure energy.

Yuggoth was composed of SeeTee matter.

The mountains and plains of Yuggoth, its black, viscid seas, its ebony ice caps, its cyclopean cities with their towering, eye-wrenching structures, its monstrous inhabitants, all were composed of contraterrene matter. Of antimatter.

Chen Jing-kuo returned to the electron telescope. She trained it upon the Yuggothian city directly below the point where Kimana Hasani’s pod and Kimana Hasani himself had been converted to pure energy. The city lay in ruins. Titanic structures had been toppled, crushed to rubble. The inhabitants of the city had died by the millions, their terrible bodies torn and scattered hither and yon.

Shaking her head, Chen Jing- kuo wiped her tears. She turned from the telescope and opened a hyperlightspeed link to Luna. The communications operator who received her call was a onetime classmate, Matyah Melajitm. For a moment Melajitm’s smile filled Dr. Chen’s screen. Then the comm- op saw the expression on Chen Jing-quo’s face.

“What’s the matter? Something’s happened. What is it?”

“Get Dr. Jerom. Kimana is dead. We seem — I think we’ve started a war. The first interplanetary war!”

It seemed to take hours — more likely less than two minutes — for Harleyann Jerom to replace Matyah Melajitm at the Luna comm-link.

“Dr. Chen, tell me.”

Chen Jing-quo gave her a quick summary of the event.

Harleyann Jerom groaned. “All right, Chen. Do nothing now. Better yet, batten down Beijing 11–11. Not that I imagine you can do much to defend the station if the Yuggothi choose to counterattack. They’re likely to interpret the explosion as an attack. They surely will if they’re anything like us.”

“There was no way. I mean, how could Kimana ever imagine. ” Dr. Chen’s voice trailed away.

“Never mind blame,” Jerom responded. “There will be plenty of time for that later on. Or maybe not. But not now, that’s for sure. Keep the link open.”

Chen Jing-quo saw Harleyann Jerom turn away, heard her give instructions to Matyah Melajitm. Chen knew that Jerom was going to talk with Earth, get a quick decision from the politicians who ran planetary affairs.

A quick decision.

Fat chance.

Jerom reappeared on Beijing 11–11’s comm screen. “Chen, was there ever — ever — any indication that the Yuggothi were even aware of Beijing 11–11?”

Chen Jing-quo shook her head. “No. That’s what was so — we tried — we tried to establish communication with them. They ignored us. Or — it wasn’t even that. It was as if they were completely unaware of us. As if were bacteria, viruses, and they were humans. Or mammoths. How many bacteria does such a beast crush with every step? To the Yuggothi we were bacteria or less. They never even noticed us. Until Kimana hit their atmosphere. Then. ” She spread her hands, helpless to continue.

Harleyann Jerom nodded. “An apt simile. They probably won’t be angry with us. A mersa bacterium doesn’t hate its host and a human doesn’t hate a bacterium. They’re just two kinds of organism, and one will kill the other in order to preserve itself and perpetuate its kind. The infection will kill the host or the host will kill the infection.”

“Right.” Chen Jing-kuo reacted with a manic grin.

Jerom’s voice was harsh. “Get a grip!”

“Nothing personal,” Dr. Chen went on.

“I said, get a grip! This is a crisis that could make all the wars in human history look like playground squabbles.”

“I’m sorry,” Chen said. She was calmer now. Her nerves were jumping. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest. It must be beating close to two hundred beats a minute. Her breath was coming in desperate gasps.

She recognized the phenomena. Some ancestor was reaching down to her, reaching through the genetic matter that carried ancient reflexes. Her body sensed her desperation, prepared itself for combat or for flight. Appropriate reactions for a Cro-Magnon, for Pithecanthropus Erectus, for an ancestor even more ancient. But hardly apt for Homo Interplanetarius.

She was in control of herself. “What are my instructions, Dr. Jerom?”

“For now, observe and report. What do you see on Yuggoth?”

Chen returned to the telescopes. She activated a third screen, one for an electron image, one for an optical image, one for a superimposed combination.

“It’s daytime down there. You know, it’s always daytime on Yuggoth. The planet rotates but its light comes from its core so it doesn’t really matter. The city that was destroyed by the shock wave — I see Yuggothi arriving from all directions. I suppose they’re rescue crews. The devastation is terrible. The casualties — I can’t even guess at the number. Some of them are still alive, though. I see Yuggothi crawling through the ruins. Some with dreadful injuries. Some are just — just — it looks as if their body parts, when they were ripped off by the shock wave, some of them didn’t die and now they’re flopping around, moving like torn starfish. And — and — I can’t go on, Harleyann. I can’t.”

“That’s all right, Jing-kuo. You’ve done what you can. And we’re getting feeds from Beijing 11–11’s instruments.”

There was a pause, then Harleyann Jerom resumed. “You’re convinced that Kimana Hasani’s EEP set off the explosion on Yuggoth?”

Dr. Chen’s eyes were still focused on the screens showing conditions on the surface of Yuggoth. “I’m certain, Harleyann. The only explanation — I’m convinced it’s the only explanation, the only way that little EEP could cause the devastation — the only explanation is that Yuggoth is composed of antimatter. Once Kimana’s EEP hit the atmosphere, that was all it took. The EEP and Kimana himself were canceled out. Converted to pure energy, along with an equivalent mass of Yuggothi atmosphere. He — ”

Her words were cut off by a gasp from Harleyann Jerom. Then the voice of the woman on Luna said, “They’re here!”

“Who? What are you saying, Harleyann?”

“The Yuggothi.”

“Impossible. I just saw them leave their planet.”

“They’re here. They’re circling overhead. Their ships are unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. They look like — like cyborgs. They’re monsters, something like bats, something like octopuses, something like humans. And machines. They’re machines, too.”

“But — they can’t have traveled that far in a few minutes.”

“They can, Jing-kuo. They must have — I don’t know — we manage to skip messages through wormholes or subspace or however our system works. We don’t really understand, do we, we just know that it works. And they’ve found a way to travel, oh, not through space. Between space. Whatever. And they’re heading toward earth, Jing-kuo. I can see. I can see waves of blackness sweeping across the planet. The atmosphere is burning, the oceans, forests, ice caps. Oh, my God, my God, my God. It’s worse than — ”

The transmission ended.

Chen Jing-kuo studied the surface of Yuggoth, pulsing red, filling the sky above Beijing 11–11.

The virus doesn’t hate its host, she thought, and the host doesn’t really hate the virus. There is nothing personal about it. Nothing personal. If the host doesn’t destroy the virus in time, the virus will kill the host. But even if that happens, once the host is dead, the virus also will die.

Chen Jing-kuo turned the telescope toward Earth. The image was magnified until it filled a screen. As she watched, bits of black appeared on the blue-and-white disk. They spread from points to irregular blots. More of them appeared, and more, until they began to run together.

For a moment the planet disappeared against the solid black background of space. Then points appeared again, became blots, multiplied and grew until Earth was a red disk. Like Yuggoth, it began to pulse, to pulse like a malevolent heart. Now Chen Jing- kuo understood what she was seeing. The Yuggothi, she realized, had devised a means to convert the normal matter of earth, contact with which would have been instantly, disastrously fatal to them, into contraterrene matter. Antimatter.

Now they could live in earth, and now there remained no other life to compete with them.

But Yuggoth itself was also contraterrene. The Yuggothi had erected no shield against a potential plunging space station of terrene matter. For all Chen Jing- kuo could tell, the Yuggothi were as unaware of the station as a human would be of a single fatal bacterium.

Earth was dead. Chen Jing-kuo knew that now. The Yuggothi had wiped it clean. The atmosphere was gone. The oceans, the forests. The ice caps were gone. The planet had been wiped clean. It now had new owners. Octopus-bat-man-machine things that even now were walking or slithering or flying across the black, dead surface of the once blue-green, beautiful world. The black surface that was now pulsing with a red, evil beat.

The oblate globe of Yuggoth spun beneath Beijing 11–11. Chen Jing- kuo set the controls, activated the verniers, sent Beijing 11–11 plunging toward Yuggoth. This time, the sequence of events was reversed. The host had killed the virus, but the virus retained enough vitality for one final act. The virus would kill the host.