Cthulhu's Reign

REMNANTS Fred Chappell

Echo was thrashing and muttering in her sleep and would soon have cried out if Vern had not crawled over in the dark to her pallet and addressed her ear, making only a whisper- noise and no words. “Psss, psss, psss.”

“Psss psss psss,” she answered imitating his exact sibilance, as she always did.

“Hush now,” he murmured. “Don’t cry out.”

These five words she repeated also, her inflection reproducing his. She had not wakened.

“What is it?” he said, speaking ever so softly. “Is it a shiny? Is it a waggly? Is it a too-bright?”

All this she mimicked.

“No,” he said. “Say what.”

“No. Say what.” Then, in a while: “Dirt. Broke dirt.”

“Broken dirt,” her brother said. He was trying to lengthen the loop of her phrases so that more information would filter into its sequence of repetition. He was four years older than she; he was going on sixteen now, but he had learned to be almost tirelessly patient. He looked to see if Moms had been wakened by the girl’s unrest, but she seemed to sleep soundly, lying in the leaf pile with her face turned away and covered with scraps of cloth and burlap and canvas. She shivered a little; it was impossible to sleep warmly in their cave behind the waterfall, and they were reduced to rags for blankets.

“Broke dirt,” Echo said.

“Why broke-dirt? What for broke-dirt? Where is broke-dirt?”

“Psss psss psss. Hush now. Don’t cry out. What is it? Is it a shiny. ” She had started from the beginning again, her voice copying his in every breath, but not becoming louder, so probably what disturbed her sleep was not an Old One sweeping a thoughtprobe through the landscape in random search, as they so often did. The black mixed collie, Queenie, lay watching the brother and the sister, and she was peaceful, with her head on her paws and not bristling. Nor was she growling in that dangerous but almost inaudible manner that meant she understood that Echo had detected something perilous nearby.

Vern decided he could go back to sleep. Whatever Echo had encountered could wait till morning. She was a little easier to communicate with when she was awake, but communication required an immense store of calmness.

Which I have not got, he thought, as he lay down in his place and recovered himself with rags and leaves. I have just about run out of calm, the way I have run out of ideas about where to find food.

He thought about that, staring into the darkness above. The stream whose bed roofed the cave in which they lived offered fish, the small speckled trout native to these mountains. In summer there were berries and rabbits and other small game, but that season was dwindling and the trees were dropping their leaves so quickly they seemed to be racing to denude themselves. The family had not managed to put much by for the winter. The Old Ones and their shoggoth slaves had been active in this area all through the summer, so Vern and Moms had foraged less often than they desired. Also, Moms and Vern did not like to leave Echo alone in the cave, even with Queenie there to disguise her mind and to protect her.

This was the main reason they shared food with Queenie. The dog thought in the same way that Echo did. She thought in pictures and not in words; she thought in terms of smell and sound as much as in visuals, and this was true too of Echo. The Old Ones who swept a casual thought probe through would probably identify Echo as a dog or an opossum or raccoon. If Vern and Moms kept their feelings at a low level and were as careful as possible not to think in large generalizations like “weather,” “time,” “yesterday,” “the future,” and so forth, the pictures in the heads of Queenie and Echo would pretty well mask the ways of thought of Vern and Moms.

Of course, if the Olders — as Vern called them — set out to make a thorough and deliberate search, there would be no way to hide. And no way to defend themselves. They would be captured, examined inside and out, and when that bloody, shrieking inventory was complete, they would be discarded, unless the Olders found something in one of their minds to isolate and store in their cyborganic memory banks.

But this latter possibility was extremely unlikely. In their family, only their father, Donald Peaslee, had known anything that could have been of use to the Olders. They took it from him, whatever it was, along with his sanity first and then with his life.

Vern would not think about that. If he thought about the way his father, or what was left of him, had looked the last time he saw him, his emotions would rise like a scarlet banner run up a flagpole and then maybe an Older would notice and come hunting. Or maybe the Older would send a throng of their stupid and disgusting shoggoths to search them out. The cosmetic ministrations those creatures wreaked on humans prettified them no more than did the interrogations of the Olders.

But something had nudged Echo’s sleeping mind with its strange faculties and it was needful to know what that might have been.

When morning came, he would make an attempt, if she had not forgotten. Well no, Echo was incapable of forgetting anything. Everything that had ever happened to her, everything she had seen and felt and heard and smelled and tasted was all there in her mind. But it was hard to draw it out because she had no categories. You had to find a specific detail and then add that to another and then another and another until some sort of picture was suggested.

He sighed and turned to sleep and just as he was letting go, he fancied that something touched his own mind too, with just the whisper of a whisper. Then he decided he was only imagining; he lacked Echo’s quick, delicate talent.

Vern wanted to question his sister the first moment the three of them were awake, but there was no chance of that. For Echo, everything had to fall into place in a customary routine. First, Vern had to go outside and “scout,” as Moms put it — meaning that he had to find a tree and take a leak, fill a can with stream water, and look for dangers or for nothing until Moms had cleaned up Echo and brushed her hair as best she could and made her feel Echo-ish. This was one of the few times she enjoyed being touched by others, except for petting and hugging Queenie and guiding Vern’s hand during the drawing sessions.

So out he went into a gray, chilly dawn with its sky streaked here and there with scores of dropping meteorites. This time he really did look about for signs of danger because of Echo’s restlessness and his own vague feeling that something was waiting to happen. He toured the small, handy game traps he had set, but they were empty this morning. He had been seeing raccoon sign by a little streamlet that fed into the waterfall stream and was pretty sure he could capture it some soon morning before dawn. That would be glad news for the family, meat and pelt together. He did not bother to look into the fish trap set at the farther end of the waterfall pool; he had seen yesterday evening that a large brook trout was captured in the willow-withe cage and he would let it stay there to keep fresh. They already had stocked two smoked trout in the cave, one for now and one for the other meal of the day.

He let himself recall, for the most fleeting of moments, the great, lush blackberries he had gathered some forty-odd days ago, so juicy-sweet they had made Echo tremble as she crammed them into her mouth by handfuls while Moms watched her with teary eyes.

Then he turned the thought away. It might make his emotions rise to a detectable level. The Olders.

Time now to go back. Inside, he saw Echo all freshened up to the best of her mother’s ability. She was hugging Queenie and singing her wake- up song: “All night all night all night. ”

He found his length of steel — a flattened lever two feet long — and went to the ember hole, lifted off the slate covering, and dug out one of the cylinders of foil. The other he left for supper. He covered the hole over again and brought the trout to where Moms and Echo sat waiting.

Mom looked more tired than yesterday, he thought, but Echo was as happy as ever she could be. She liked the taste of the trout smoked in foil, but more than that, she liked the anticipation of eating it. She drummed her hands on her crossed legs, smiling and murmuring softly her song, “All night all night.”

“Thank you, Vern,” Moms said when he handed her the packet. “Did you sleep well?”

“Echo was hearing something,” he said. “She was almost awake.”

“I know.” Moms took the one metal knife they possessed from her belt and divided the fish. Her belt held up the britches she had stitched together with nylon fishing leader from an old, mostly rotten tent they had found in the woods. They needed to find some more fabric soon or roam around naked. Echo would not like that; she must have her many-colored robe, cloth scraps of every kind held together with pins and wire bits and paper clips and whatnot. She would squall if she had to go naked.

“There is something she wants to tell us about,” Vern said.

“The Old Ones?”

“I don’t know. Should we try to find out?”

“Maybe we should. I heard once long ago that they make parts of forests like this one into preserves and stock them with all sorts of animals that might harm us. To this particular environment, they might import grizzly bears and gray wolves and panthers. Wolves and panthers used to inhabit here.”

“I know,” Vern said. But he didn’t know and he wouldn’t inquire. I heard once long ago — this was Moms’ phrase to indicate something her husband had told her. Best never to say his name, for sorrow would rise in them and such a feeling — or any strong feeling — was so alien to the Olders that they could detect it at fairly long range.

His father had known many things: history and science and music and numbers and stars. He had known too much about the stars. He had known too much about everything. See what grief his learning had brought them. Vern turned aside these thoughts.

But Moms had remembered some of the history her husband knew. He had told her of the caves in this part of the mountains where remnants of the Cherokee nation hid out when the soldiers came to drive them away and to rape and kill and burn. Those who did not hide in the caves were herded on the Trail of Tears, to suffer and die on the brutal march westward. Vern had found signs and leavings in their own cave. A rose-colored flint knife was his special treasure.

Queenie had trotted out of the cave when they began eating the fish. She would scout the area, ranging farther than Vern had done, and then return for her own meal. It had taken a long time to reconcile her to this routine, but they needed a sentry in this hour. When Echo ate, she could concentrate on nothing else until the breakfast ritual was complete. When Queenie returned, Vern would feed the dog the smoked opossum buried in the ember hole. Now he passed to his mother and sister the can of water brought from the stream. Each drank, then both washed their hands and faces, Echo mimicking Moms’ actions closely.

Tasks awaited Vern. He needed to fashion new traps from whatever pliable materials he could find. He already had a good-sized stock; the woods were full of discarded things, trash that was treasure for the family. He also needed to pile wood to dry for burning and to fashion into rude tools to dig and scrape with. But he was concerned about what Echo might have discovered. This was a good time to try to talk to her; she was calm and good-natured after feeding.

He sat on the earth floor beside her and began slowly. “Echo?”

She shook her head and would not look at him. Sometimes she was shy about contact; sometimes she seemed only to be teasingly coy, but of course she was incapable of such an attitude.

“Echo?” He kept repeating her name until she did look at him, her bright gray eyes staring into his face, her gaze now locked to his.

“Broke dirt. Do you remember? Broke dirt. Dirt broken. Do you remember?”

Yes, she remembered. She never forgot anything. But getting her to speak of one specific subject in the past was difficult because she knew no past. Everything was immediate.

“Broke dirt,” he said again and, for a wonder, she repeated the phrase — three times in a row.

“What for, broke dirt?”

She repeated this phrase too for awhile and then interrupted the loop. “Go. Go broke dirt.”

“Where is it?”

This question would make no sense to her and he regretted asking it. Sometimes when words made no sense, she would fall into a spooky silence and sit unspeaking, unmoving, for hours.

He had found out, though, that something had spoken in her mind, or to it, saying that the three of them must travel to Broken Dirt, wherever and whatever that was. He waited and then said, “Draw?”

She nodded, solemn-faced.

“Let’s go to the drawing sand,” he said and when she nodded again, he crawled over to a space toward the cave mouth where the light was brighter. Moms took Echo’s hand and they joined him and Moms sat beside Echo, to be near and reassure her.

This space was a circle about four feet in diameter. Vern had cleared away the pebbles and smoothed the floor and brought fine sand from the bottom of the stream and poured it and spread it out. This was where they wrote and drew and Moms taught Vern mathematics and geometry and a little geography. Here too Echo and Vern drew the pictures that came into Echo’s mind. Echo had many words in her head, but she could not order them into concepts; she could not abstract. Her world was made up of separate, individual things that could be, and sometimes had to be, placed in rote positions. She had no categories to put things into. Queenie did not belong to the family of dogs; she belonged to the family of Queenie and there were no other members. For all the masses of words heaped in her capacious, seemingly unlimited memory, Echo could not know what a word was.

It made everything extremely difficult, for she was their best detector of the Olders. She could hear sounds as acutely as Queenie, perhaps, and she could see even better, for the dog was less receptive to color. As for odors, there Queenie had it all over the girl. Queenie was particularly sensitive to the Old Ones’ smell and if it became too strong she was uncontrollable, yelping and howling and snapping. She might bite even Vern in her terror.

“Let’s draw how dirt is broken,” Vern said. “Show me how.” He took up the curved stick lying by the sand circle and held it in his right hand. It was a slightly arced, two-foot length of a sapling maple branch he had trimmed and sharpened.

It took some time before Echo would touch him, but at last she laid her small, porcelain- like hand on the back of his wrist and with slight but not tentative movements began to guide. The marks she directed Vern to make were incomprehensible, but he had learned to wait for the process to conclude. First a mark here by her knee, then one over there so that he had to lean to make it and then one to the left almost out of the circle. Vern could not draw things in that way himself and he was always surprised when the marks joined together to form an image.

This time the picture would be of Broken Dirt, whatever that might be, but when Echo took her hand from his wrist and snuggled her face into Moms’s shoulder, he thought that she must not have finished the picture and had given up. He had been struck by this fear before, that Echo was only making random scratches. She never closed her eyes to concentrate. It was as if she saw an image already in the sand and was merely tracing it out. So he leaned close and studied.

It was not a picture of an animal or a person or of one of the Olders. Echo could not have drawn one of the latter without crying out in terror and retreating into herself for a long time. It was no machine that Vern could puzzle out; the lines were too far apart. Maybe it was some building or monument the Olders had constructed or that they were constructing now. They were always busy, always remaking the world around them into something it should not be, something that made Vern queasy when he saw it. Echo’s picture was of nothing that plied through the sky like the monstrous flying machines that whispered back and forth in the upper air on unguessable errands.

Maybe it was something in the stream. There was a wavy line between two sets of straight- line segments that were joined. There were squiggly circles and lines disposed about the line-segments. He peered more closely at the wavy line between the segment sets; it was broken in two places with small empty spaces.

Echo was watching him look, her face expressionless. When he pointed at one of the broken places and asked, “Is it a waggly?” she buried her face in Moms’ shoulder. Then she looked out again to watch him examine it.

So, whatever, the hiatus indicated, it was not something that flapped or waved or fluttered in the breeze. Those irregular movements fascinated Echo; they were to her the salient parts of any landscape.

“Is it a too-bright?”

Echo rocked back and forth, excited, but she did not smile.

A too-bright would be something that flashed or glittered or glimmered. There were two of them, so it probably wouldn’t be something that emitted a steady shine as an artificial light would probably do. What things in nature flashed or flickered intermittently?

Well, it was a stream, of course, or a river. When the three of them went to bathe in the stream in the warm summer, the thing that captured Echo’s attention most firmly was the way the sunlight reflected off the wavelets. She was transfixed, watching these changing lights as fixedly as if she were trying to decipher a code.

So then, if the wavy line were a stream, the surrounding segments would represent the banks. The squiggly circles and other lines would represent bushes and grasses.

Except that Echo could not “represent” with abstract symbols. She always guided Vern’s hand to draw, as closely as the sand-medium would allow, the exact lineaments of the thing to be seen. So his interpretation must be wrong and these disjointed marks composed a realistic picture of something he could not recognize.

Or —

Or maybe it was a true-to-life drawing of the picture that was in her mind. Maybe it had come to her just as it was laid out here in the sand, a schematic diagram of a place. In that case, it must have been sent to her as a message — and not from the Olders or any of their slaves. Their aura about it would ravage his sister. She would crouch with her face to the cave wall, clutching her knees and wailing.

He looked at her, safe in Moms’ arms, watching him. She was not frightened. The message had come from something or someone else than they knew, an entity that had searched to find a receptive mind and had encountered Echo. This was not the first of her extrasensory episodes. Such experiences had been remarked as fairly widespread among autistics, even before the advent of the Olders had heightened, in greater and less degree, according to individuals, those powers among humans. Some person, or group of persons, was trying to make contact, either with Echo alone or with the whole family by means of Echo.

He examined the drawing again. Was he looking at a map? Did these scattered lines represent a specific place? He could not ask. “Place” would mean nothing to Echo. If she arrived at the location suggested by her drawing, she almost certainly would not be able to recognize it. It would be too detailed and, to her, would bear no resemblance to the lines in the sand.

Well then, supposing that this telepathic being, whatever it might be, really had transmitted a map to Echo’s mind, and, supposing that Vern had interpreted the hiatuses in the wavy line correctly, how would the sender have known to include a representation of a “too-bright” in the scheme? The telepath would have to know her mind thoroughly, understanding the way Echo experienced things and reacted to them. But that would not be possible without her knowledge and if she had felt someone rummaging through her mind-pictures, her fear and trembling would alert her mother and brother.

If, however, the telepath understood the kind of mind it had touched, it would not need intimate knowledge of its contact. If she or he or it recognized autism and had had previous commerce with autistic personalities, it would know how to contact them and how to communicate information without distressing that person. Echo had been disturbed; she had murmured in her sleep, reacting to the encounter, but she had not been distressed. The telepath was not immediately threatening. But the further intentions might not be benevolent.

Now, supposing that his first two notions were not groundless, the situation would be that some being had made purposeful contact with the family, or at least with Echo, and had transmitted a map, though one with limited geographical information. Perhaps it had transmitted only as much as it estimated that Echo could receive and pass on.

Why had it done so? Did it desire that the family travel to the mapped place?

He passed his hand above the sand drawing and looked at Echo, into her unwavering stare, and asked, “Go here?”

For a long time she did not respond and when she did, it was only to sing one of her songs. “All night all night all night. ”

“Queenie, play with Echo,” Vern said and the big black dog rose and came to his sister and nuzzled her elbow and suffered herself to be petted. This was one way to break Echo’s verbal cycles, but it did not always work.

She had retreated from his question, Vern realized, because here meant to her not the place the diagram represented but the sand itself. Echo did not want to go sit in the circle and destroy her drawing; she was always proud when she had guided Vern to draw a picture that was in her head.

She would never be able to say, “Yes, let us travel to the place we have drawn the map of. Something wants us to be there and it is important.” Those wishful sentences Vern furnished for himself in his anxiety to comprehend, and this fancy was a signal of his frustrated impatience.

There might be other explanations for the contact. Vern knew that others had retreated to these caves to escape the onslaught of the Olders. In their small university town, most people had been killed with dreadful weapons or left to the mercies of the slave-organisms called shoggoths that had no notion of what mercy might be, and so killed lingeringly, as if taking enjoyment from the spectacle and music of the final agonies. A number of persons had been taken away to the colossal laboratory structures the Olders had reared and there they were divested of the knowledge the dire creatures judged might be useful to their purposes — whatever those might be.

Among those who had managed to flee and hide in the caves that had once sheltered the abused Cherokee people, there might be another autistic with some of the extrasensory powers that Echo possessed.

The question would still remain, however. Why should such a person transmit a map? Whoever sent it had sent an invitation. Or a summons.

They were as well prepared as they could be to leave the cave and journey. Moms and Vern had made a list and gathered the accessories necessary for travel. “Someday,” she had said, “the Old Ones will come into our territory. They are always expanding their reach, tearing down our world and rebuilding it to suit them, remaking it in their own image. So we must gather supplies and put them away in the cave and be prepared. I heard once long ago that it is best always to be prepared.”

So they had scavenged for twine and for whatever other binding materials they could find, for cloth of any kind that might warm, shelter, and hide them, and for any handy pieces of metal that could be beaten into useful shape or sharpened to an edge. There was no way to preserve foodstuffs, so Vern had laid several fish traps in the stream below the waterfall. An early autumn rain had washed away two of them, but there were three left, though only one now contained a trout.

We have enough to travel a short way if we must, he thought. He thought too about how people used to discard all sorts of good things, now useful for the family. That time was a world ago and the kind of time it had existed within could never return.

But if they were to travel, answering that summons, where would they go?

He looked at the drawing again. The line segments crowded near the wavy line upon its left- hand side, but on the other side they were set farther away. So if the wavy line was indeed a stream that sparkled intermittently, the right bank was farther from its center. Or maybe that was just the angle of vision. If the right bank only appeared to be farther, it would mean that the stream was deep in a ravine and the map showed it from the right-hand side. The stream they lived beneath ran to the south and as it rolled down the mountainside, it had cut, over the millennia, deep declivities. Vern thought that if they decided to answer the summons, they should follow the stream, descending the mountain until they found a place that fit the map.

He sighed. It was all very chancy, but this was the best interpretation he could come up with. He would talk it over with Moms in the evening. Now he would go to his daily chores, gathering food and fuel where he could and collecting any shard or scrap or leaf or root that might help to keep them alive. Then this evening they would hold council and decide.

This was the best part of the day for them, although Echo, if she were overtired in the evening, would be fretful for a tedious time before settling to nestle in Moms’ lap. Vern and Moms were by this hour good-tired, the cessation of the long, active day pleasant after their labors were accomplished. This was the hour they talked, making plans and sometimes recalling the good things they had stored in memory.

During this time they would also debate courses of action, and this evening Vern had asked Moms whether it would be wise to try to find the place Echo had depicted.

“You say it is an invitation or a summons from someone or some people we cannot know,” Moms said.

“That’s how I make it out.”

“She is not in a state. She is not frightened by this. message.”

They watched Echo. She had gone back to the circle and was playing with the sand, pouring the grains into one hand and then into the other and letting them spill through her fingers. Over and over she did this, over and over, while crooning a wordless song.

“That is one reason I think I should try to find it.”

“You?” Moms asked. “That cannot be. It would have to be the three of us together.”

“I could go find it and, if I can figure out what is going on and see whether it’s safe, then I could take us there.”

“But if you did not come back, Echo and I would perish.”

“If we all go, we all might die.”

“That would be better.” Her eyes moistened and she turned her head away. Vern heard her taking deep breaths to calm her emotions.

“It would be hard traveling with three. Faster for me to go and come back and go again.”

“But you can’t be sure you have found the right place unless Echo is with you. She will know the place when she arrives there.”

“She might not.”

“Whoever is sending the message now will tell her when she has arrived.”

“What if it is some plan of the Olders to draw humans out?”

“You have already rejected that idea or you would not even consider going. And if there was any slight hint of the Old Ones about it, Echo would smell them out. She is more sensitive to them than we are.”

“Could they not find a way to disguise their presence?”

“I don’t think so. I can’t pretend to understand their psychology; I don’t know that such a concept can even apply to them. But when I try to translate their ‘attitude,’ if I can call it that, to our terms, I would describe it as contemptuous in regard to humans. They probably hold us in less esteem than those amoebean slaves they created, those shoggoths. They think themselves invincible on our planet and maybe within the whole cosmos, as I heard once long ago. They would not think of hiding or disguising their presences. They do not confer upon us the dignity of being considered their opponents. We are, at most, mere nuisances.”

“Yes.” Vern let the image of the star- headed monstrosity slip into his mind and then imagined its disappearance before it could bring up his emotional temperature. But their handiwork, all those immense towers and cyclopean, steeply sloped pyramids with ridged ramps, all that bewildering hyper-geometry of almost unvisualizable angles — these images and many others he allowed to register in his mind. They would not attract the attention of a probe, for they were only pictures of things that existed and any animal might be gazing upon them. “Yes,” he said, “we are only minor pests to them. But we know that they have enemies much more powerful than we are. They have battled Cthulhu and triumphed and were defeated and then triumphed again. This is something I heard once long ago. It may be that this call — this invitation or summons — is intended to entrap an enemy more dangerous than humans.”

“But in that case the call would be cast in terms utterly alien to us. I do not think Echo could even react to it.”

Again Vern looked at his sister. The world outside had darkened as the hour deepened and the sound of the curtaining waterfall seemed to grow louder. Echo, with her silvery long hair and porcelain-pale skin almost glowed ghostlike in the dim cave. She had stopped pouring sand and was gathering it into little mounds spaced out evenly from one another. After mounding a fifth small pile, she stopped and sat up cross-legged with her hands in her lap, looking toward the cave mouth.

“Well, what do you think we should do?” Vern asked.

“It is time to go to sleep. Maybe you’d like to scout around outside a little. Maybe when Echo goes to sleep tonight, she will receive another message and maybe it will be clearer than this map diagram she drew.”

Moms’ suggestion was what Vern had expected. He supposed that prudence was probably their best policy, but he was apprehensive. Someone or something knew of their existence. They went on with their hardscrabble daily lives as if the Olders did not know about them, keeping as closely as possible to narrowly settled routines, to behavior that did not arouse their feelings or require unusual degrees of mental activity. Quietude was their only camouflage. If they had to journey, the stress of traveling with Echo might rouse attention, but if pursuers were closing in, there would be no choice but to travel.

It was dark here; the detestable five-pointed orange moon was not in the sky — and he was grateful for that. Skirting around the waterfall by a familiar but barely traceable pathway over the rocks, Vern walked a little way down the stream edge. Then he stopped and breathed in the night air that was growing ever colder with the season. He shivered. The scraps of canvas and plastic and cloth Moms had spliced into a motley robe-like garment was draughty, to say the least. He hugged his chest.

And then he thought he heard a sound different from the customary night noises. A thin, high yelping far, far away. Perhaps the Olders had introduced an animal new to this forest, some strain of wolf, or an animal of their own engineering.

Then he heard it no more and decided that his imagination was overly exercised. He turned and headed back to the cave where Echo and Moms would be ready for sleep by now.

Despite his apprehensions, Vern was sleepy. Although his day had been physically a little less active than usual, anxiety had depleted his mental energy. He lay for a few minutes, listening. He could tell that Moms was not asleep; she was surely thinking through their discussion. Echo was asleep in her own way, though sometimes Vern wondered if she ever actually slept, the way that he and Moms and Queenie did — as Queenie was doing now, her large head laid on her large paws.

Almost as soon as he closed his eyes, he began to dream. His viewing floated like an invisible balloon, bodiless, and traversed one of the Olders’ cities, if that was what they were to be called. He envisioned entering underground through a huge doorless opening. If he were making this journey in his body, his every nerve would be pulsing with fear as he passed tremendous pentagonal pools of unknown black liquids and drifted through rooms filled with curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machines at whose purposes he could not guess. They were all motionless until he came to one larger than the rest. It was so large that the top of it must have extended through the cavern roof into the outside world. It seemed to buckle inward and outward continuously, the matte gray planes of its panels seeming to open and close simultaneously, as if it were a strange doorway allowing both entrance and exit in the same vertiginous movement. This machine uttered a high-pitched piping sound and it seemed to Vern that the noise was like the sound of the faraway yelping or baying he had thought he heard outside by the stream.

Then he woke.

Queenie was awake too, making her dangerous, nearly inaudible growl. And Echo was awake and Moms was sitting up straight, her eyes wide and glistening in the dark. The three of them listened to that piping; it was still far away, still small among the sounds of the waterfall and of the forest at night, but it was dreadfully intelligible:

Tekeli-li Tekeli-li.

“Ship?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Are all things well?”

“Very well. The mission is proceeding according to procedure.”

“That is good,” I said and truly I felt a happy relief in my organism. “Am I sober enough to take command?”

“You are not entirely cleansed of deepsleep narcosis,” Ship said, “but you are rational and your body is highly operable, though it needs exercise, as do the bodies of the other crew members.”

“Please find if they are well and sober,” I said. “Doctor, Navigator, Seeker — how do they fare?”

“They fare well. No. Disregard. Farewell is a phrase suitable for departures. The crew fare good. They are beginning to awake.”

“I will address them when all is sober.”

“The correct would be, when all are sober,” said Ship.

“Are you certain?”

“Eighty-four point oh-two certain.”

“Our mission dialect is difficult,” I said.

“The English is,” Ship said. “There are other planetary languages more difficult; there are others less so. Part of the problem is that we have taken our knowledge of these languages from what remained of the libraries of relic spaceships. The electronics were primitive and much has been lost to age-deterioration and other damage.”

“But we must persevere,” I replied, “for if our mission performance is well, we must be ready to converse.”

“All the crew have been instructed during normal sleep periods and also during deepsleep, but that is not the same as speaking. We all must practice.”

“I will write my account in English,” I said. “That will be strong practice.”

“We salute your pluck,” Ship said, speaking for the Alliance, I presumed.

While Ship was waking the rest of the crew, I undertook the prescribed medicines and waters and endured the exercises. During the stretches and lunges, I reviewed the tasks that awaited. The Starheads had taken over the planet third from the sun to use as a base for offensive strikes and architectural experiment. As usual, they had almost eradicated the dominant intelligent species and there remained only scattered Remnants that were like my siblings and me. Our own home had been destroyed and the four members left of my family had been rescued by a small party of scientists who were members of the Radiance Alliance, the ancient foes of the Starheads. The Alliance are a highly advanced race (in our local mission world they were called the Great Ones) and they have thought it desirable to try to preserve all the different species of life that they could rescue. The Starheads (locally known as the Old Ones) regard every other species of intelligent beings but themselves as enemies, active or potential. For this reason, they kill all. But if any can be saved from slaughter, the Great Ones strive to that end and send out disguised spying machines where the Starheads are active to find if some few survivors escaped their attentions. Traces of Remnants had been detected here and Ship and crew had been dispatched.

So here we were. Our task was to find and rescue as many fugitives from the Old Ones as possible.

It was no easy job, and to accomplish it, we had only the four of us and Ship. We were not in direct contact with the Alliance for fear that the Starheads might trace signals back to our base and thereupon wreak destruction.

I desisted from my exercises and greeted my ship-mates as they left their cubes and entered the control room one by one.

First there came my younger brother, whom Ship had designated navigator and now we used this title instead of his actual name. It is best to call him Navigator in this narrative in case information might be gleaned from his own name. Though he is younger than I, he is more muscled and usually bests me in the pan-agon arena where we exercise martially. Still, I have been designated Captain and he must receive my orders, which he does mostly patiently and sometimes not. His duty is to cooperate with Ship to keep knowledgeable of our spatial locations, of the happenstances in our space environment, and to locate and trace the movements upon the planetary surface of any Remnants we might contact.

My sister, who is only slightly younger than me, Ship names Doctor because it is her duty to tend the health of us three others. She monitors not only illness but also signs of emotional disturbance and of sudden, untoward changes in our mental states. She must keep watch that the thoughtprobes of Starheads do not disrupt our minds or displace them completely to make us to be crawlers and droolers, bereft of rationality, trying to do away with ourselves and with one another. She is always glancing at graph-screens and listening to corporal rhythms that Ship relays to her about our bodilies.

My youngest sister we call Seeker, a name not so pretty by far as her own true name. I should not write so here, perhaps, but she is my favorite person in the cosmos and also she is the favorite of all the crew. Whereas Navigator and Doctor are largish of corpus and darkly haired and complected, Seeker is as white as a gleaming mineral and her skin seems to glow, almost. Her eyes are green but become violet-like of color when she makes mind contact with others. Her hair is silver silk. All female telepaths belong to this physical type, Ship says, or at least the hominids do, though I believe none others universally can be so pretty as Seeker.

Her duty is the most demanding, for she must make mind contact with a Remnant group and persuade it to come to a place within the planet where we can guide them and let them know we are not perilous and mean them no injury and that we are all trying to escape and hide from the Old Ones now and maybe in time to come grow strong and do them grievous hurt so that the cosmos will not be only Starheads and their slaves and nothing else that thinks and feels.

Here now they stood before me, the three, still a little wrinkled in spirit from deepsleep and slightly confused. But they answered cheeringly when I spoke to each and congratulated on wakefulness. “Do we all know what is to come?” I asked.

They said Yes.

Then Ship directed us to the small mess hall and we partook solid food instead of veinous alongside some happy water and were much refreshed.

Then we returned to control and set up our routines.

Millions and millions of light years we had traveled, Ship had informed Navigator. Our vessel, disguised as a comparatively leisurely meteor, had skated across the orbit of the fourth planet and soon would pass the single moon of the third planet.

Navigator suggested that we call this third planet Terra, a word from an ancient and long deceased speech known as Latin. “We cannot very well call it Earth,” he said. “All home planets are earths. Confusion must ensue.”

“Terra is sound,” I said. “Soon we shall be in its farther gravitation and perhaps Seeker can begin to search for whispers or traces of hominid Remnant mentation.”

“I shall begin when our approach is closer,” she said.

“It would require powerful amplification of telepathic signal to scan the surface from here. Amplification of such magnitude the Starheads would notice.”

“Now that we are in the Terran sun-system, let us call them Old Ones,” I said. “We do not wish to confuse the Remnant group when we make contact.”

“Very well, Captain,” she said. She wore a pretty smile when she said that. I thought how it was or seemed un-right that she, the smallest and most delicate of the crew, must perform the most difficult duties and engage the greatest risks. After all the millions of light years we had traversed through underspace, Seeker must calibrate her last tasks in terms of English yards, feet, inches and fractions of inches. It is a little like, I thought, leaping from an immensely tall tower and coming to rest lightly upon a grain of sand. While she was doing so, distractions would be taking place violently.

If any of us others could have done it for her, we would so, but we lacked the telepathic talents that are hers. We each possessed rudimentary telepathic ability, as Ship says that almost every intelligence must own, and Ship is able to link us tenuously with Seeker when necessary, but each faint contact is not voluptuously profitable. None could take Seeker’s place, but we would be aiding in all possible ways, and eagerly too.

I read through the long list of protocols and drills that Ship inscribed on my screens and during the next eight waking periods, I went through them with the crew until it would no longer help to do so.

Thereafter we rested and played games among us, though Seeker and Ship kept alert.

Then on the next watch, Seeker reported that she detected mental activity nothing like that of the Old Ones. It was a small group hiding away, she said, three or four of them. Of three she was certain, but the fourth was unclear. One of the three was a telepath, sending strange, nearly random signaling, though of course not directed at Seeker. “This telepath is un-normal of mind,” she said. She wrinkled her brow as she bent to her screens and scopes and auditories. Her console and all its instruments were nervily active, blinking and trilling, and her hands fluttered over them like white ribbons wafting in strong air convection.

“Is the Terran telepath deranged?” I asked.

“I do not know,” Seeker said, and Doctor said, “Not exactly deranged.” She was busy at her instruments also. Her console was collecting medical information from Seeker’s instruments and filtering for Doctor.

“What then?” I asked.

She hesitated then said, “I believe the Terran term is autistic.”

“Autistic?” I said.

She paused again, listening, and then repeated what Ship told her screen: “Autistic defines a mental condition or disposition lacking ability to generalize and to form conclusions aiding useful or even necessary actions. It is marked by a profound, imprisoning subjectivity. Many autistic individuals possess rudimentary telepathic capacities; some of them are well advanced in the talent.”

“Profound, imprisoning subjectivity sounds like derangement,” I said. “Is this autist able to travel distances?”

She studied for a while and then replied. “I think so, yes. But it will be difficult for her.”

“The telepath is female?”

“Yes, a she.”

“Being autistic, does she know she is telepathic?” I asked Seeker.

She studied. “We are too far. I cannot read. She may be mind-linked to a slave organism.”

“That does not bode good,” I said.

“We need to be nearer.” Her face wrinkled as she concentrated and I recalled her description of the difficulties of receiving such mental fields or auras and the messaging therein. “It is like trying to feel a photon with a fingertip,” she said. We marveled at that notion, Doctor and I. Navigator only shook his head impatiently. I think that he is sometimes a little envious of Seeker’s abilities. It is good he keeps good temper, for if we quarreled and made spats, our concentration would suffer harm.

In the ruins of the old spaceship libraries there were many descriptions of Terra’s moon. The scientific accounts put its orbital revolution at 271/3 days at a distance of 384,403 kilometers from the planet. Its bright albedo was remarked and attributed to its surface of glassy crystalline soil. There was a great amount of similar minutiae, important to Terrans because a moon base was in process of construction when the Old Ones came again. This satellite inspired poets to write of it incessantly, often in terms not faithful to astronomical fact. They frequently spoke of it in terms of silver, as “striding the night in silver shoon” or “gifting its silver smile to the still waters.”

If there were any poets upon the planet still composing, they spoke no more of a “silver orb.” The Old Ones had sculpted the satellite into a five-pointed construction, angry red-orange in color, mottled with pyramidal protrusions disposed in groups of five, a geometry vaguely suggesting the shapes of the crania of the Old Ones. The rubble from this immense project was still falling upon Terra in shower after shower of meteors and meteorites. This was one reason Ship was cloaked in the guise of a meteor. So many of such bodies were striking Terran atmosphere, it had been thought that we might be undistinguished amid the number of them.

On such frail hopes and forlorn details our enterprise depended.

I could not always keep my apprehensions at bay. The four of us, with no useful experience to rely on, dropping through its sun-system to an obscure planet, no more than a speck on the outer shoals of this galaxy, our vessel disguised and ridged and pocked as if by collisions, a mote thousands of times smaller than the watery world toward which we drifted. What madness had come upon the Great Ones to entrust us with so important a mission?

Then it came to me that our ignorance and inexperience were the factors that had determined the choice. We were a more expendable crew than most of the other search teams. Those who had survived encounters and rescued Remnant groups would be sent to more prominent fronts to undertake larger and more urgent missions. Our little family was dispatched to an odd little corner of the conflict. If the Old Ones exterminated us, the loss would be relatively unimportant — unless we let slip, through carelessness or under stress, information that might help tease out the locations of important Alliance posts.

Dreadful but necessary measures had been installed to prevent that from happening.

We kept gazing at the ugly orange moon-sculpture as it filled twelve of our visiscreens. I thought that it seemed to pulse its coloration, the orange brightening and darkening at irregular intervals, but set the impression aside as an illusions born of tensed nerves.

“Navigator,” I said, “how fare we?”

He glanced at his instruments and sighed. “Well enough, I think, though there are some slight anomalies I cannot account for. Distances seem to change irrespective of our velocity.”

“Seeker?”

“I think the Starheads — I mean, the Old Ones — may be distressing the local space-weave,” she said. “They are probably constructing some of those colossal engines we were taught about. The energies exchanged are so enormous they may twist space-time here.”

Navigator said this might account for his observations.

Then Seeker asked us to fall quiet. “I may be feeling something,” she said. “Silence will help me to concentrate. I am picking up fearful emotions. At least, I think perhaps.”

“The crew will silence,” I said.

Seeker had spoken before of the fear the fugitives on Terra must be enduring and I understood that these would be stark and continuous, but I wondered how they would feel if they knew the extent of the Old Ones’ desecrations. World on world, across all the cosmos, were crumbled to rubble or blown away to radioactive cloud, millions of nations, tribes, and civilizations were mangled to bloody ruin, the grandest achievements of art, science, religion, and philosophy had gone dark like lights turned off on a space cruiser.

The Terrans had known something of the Old Ones before this time. They had learned, but they had forgotten — almost purposefully, it seemed. In one of the relic spaceship libraries was a long document concerning something called Miskatonic Expedition 1935. This exploration project had discovered in land- mass Australia “certain traces” the Old Ones had left “in rocks even then laid down a thousand million years. laid down before the true life of [Terra] had existed at all.” The Terrans, according to this history, knew about the struggles of the Old Ones against the “spawn” of Cthulhu and the abominable Mi-Go and about some of the interstellar subjugations and massacres. These things they knew, but when the ancient evils rose again from the sea or “seeped down” from the stars, they were not prepared.

Their lack of realization had been pointedly described by their best historian of Cthulhu and the Old Ones and Great Ones. He spoke candidly of their failure, imputing it to “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” He drew a dark, disheartening view of his species: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in a black sea of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

They had not voyaged far, but black infinity had come upon them, and few were left and those scattered few must endure miserable, terror- filled days and nights. These Terrans probably would not be counted among the greatest of races in the cosmos; they were not the widest thinkers or most accomplished builders or the most generous of spirit. Yet they had achieved things fine in their way, however modest. Their erasure would be a waste, pathetic if not tragic. They had struggled against the Old Ones, this planet full of nations. Now we four individuals must struggle against the same implacable force.

I ordered myself not to allow this mood of thought to dominate my spirit.

After the next sleep period, Seeker told us that she had located geographically the Terran telepath and her group. It was a family of four, including the mysterious ancillary member whose thoughts Seeker could partially read but only sometimes. “She too is a female, this other one, and, like the telepath, she has extremely limited language skills, so that it is difficult to understand her thought patterns. She mostly thinks without words and possesses sensory organs different from those of her companions. She may belong to a different species.”

“Yet you say she is not enslaved,” I said.

“It is an arrangement we do not have ourselves,” she said.

“Does she see herself as part of the group?”

“Yes. But I need more information.”

“We will now orbit-out three locator flyers,” I said. “They will triangulate the source-point of the telepathic signals, just as we rehearsed.”

Ship gave a slight lurch, having dispatched the flyers as I was speaking. Each flyer contained amplifiers to reinforce the signals from Terra. They transmitted simultaneously pictures of the planetscape to the ship screens and to Seeker’s mind. If all performed according to scheme, we would have pictures of the close environs of the Remnant family in eight hours or fewer.

But it was a tiring interlude for Seeker. I watched her at work, her neck and shoulders tense in concentration. I could see the muscles strain as she bent to her console. Her lightweight white robe emphasized her taut slenderness and she frowned and smiled alternately, as the signal strengthened or faded. I could almost read Seeker’s mind as she seined through the blasts of data she intook, making innumerable decisions almost instantaneously.

Doctor too was concentrating. Her mechanisms were now principally focused upon Seeker, monitoring her physical conditions to the finest detail. If something touched Seeker’s mind, the event would show on Doctor’s screens and she would decide whether Ship must go dark, maybe forever.

Navigator was occupied with directing the flyers, maneuvering them within the Terran atmosphere in accordance with the directionals of the Remnants’ telepath.

All this went on for long and long.

“The signals are stronger now,” Seeker said. Her voice was a musical whisper that floated above the steady mechanical humming of the control room. “I have a closely approximate placement. They are in a wilderness terrain. The locator flyers send pictures of the area. Can Navigator direct a beacon landing near?”

He considered for a time. “Yes,” he said and described briefly the landscape at large, with particular emphasis upon a river in its midst and a high bluff that hung above its lower stretches. “But we must be secret and exquisite of touch. The plateau there is close upon a place where the Old Ones are laboring. I cannot make out exactly what they are constructing, but their presence will be strong there and the beacon cannot be placed any farther downstream. Even so, that plateau is the best choice.”

“Have the flyers recorded pictures Seeker can send?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Seeker?” I asked.

“Have forbearance,” she said. “Contact is complex.”

“The Old Ones are close upon them,” I said. “There is a concern of time.”

“Have forbearance.”

Then in another while she said she was contacting and the rest of us could not help directing much attention, though we did not neglect our urgent duties. How could we not watch our most precious sister when she must undergo the rigors of contact with an alien species? The mind- frames of otherworlders are so different from ours that sometimes they can tatter the rationality of both telepathic parties. The Great Ones had described Terrans as being much like ourselves, but complete likeness was not possible and the margin of unlikeness, the forceful tension of sheer otherness, would cause a fearful strain on the mind-spirit of Seeker and perhaps a worse consequence. She once said it was like plunging down and down into a boiling sea within which unknown creatures drifted and darted, their shapes and sizes ungraspable until after long acquaintance. If the Terran telepath was indeed deranged, there was a possibility that her condition would infect Seeker’s mind.

I believed I could not do the thing my sister was doing, even if I possessed her abilities. One must be strong of selfhood and sometimes that is insufficient. According to Alliance records, a number of telepaths have been contacted by Starhead minds. Those pale individuals lived out the rest of their days in the state that the English call catatonia, though the term falls short. In catatonia the mind is inoperable, but with Old-Ones’ telepathic damage, the mind no longer exists. Some other indescribable mode of unconsciousness supplants it.

“I am receiving more strongly,” Seeker said. “Is it nighttime where the signal emits? I think she may be sleeping. Some send stronger when they sleep, in particular if they are un-normal. Sleeping, they are less distracted.”

“It is nighttime at the emission point,” Navigator said.

“What does she signal?” I asked.

“She sends large smells of an animal friendly to her. It is not a slave organism, as we feared. It is a parasite or symbiote in complex and close relationship. I do not comprehend. Her name for it is a queenie. I think that must mean companion or helpmeet.”

“May it be telepathic, this animal? Is it of normal mind?”

Seeker said nothing for long and then made a hand gesture of disappointment. “I cannot know,” she said.

“But the autist is calmly receptive while sleeping. As soon as we find a beacon place, I can tell her where.”

“This Remnant group is safe from the Old Ones for the moment?”

Now she became more and more intent, enmeshed with Ship so closely in the mind-contact it was as if she were wearing the network of amplifiers and transceivers as a robe wrapped around her thinking. “Somewhere there is something perilous,” she said. Her expression was darkening. “I cannot say what as of yet.”

“Perhaps — ” I began to say.

“Seeker, withdraw!” Doctor said.

Her face grew even more white and her eyelids fluttered. She thrashed her hands against her upper arms.

“Seeker, withdraw now!” Doctor said.

Her voice was high and thin and shrill when she said the words the autist on Terra must have been hearing. “Tekeli-li.”

“Seeker!” cried Doctor and cried we all as well.

Vern was fairly pleased with the progress they had made today. His rough estimate was that he had brought Moms and Echo about a kilometer and a half along the streamside before evening came into the woods and visibility was hindered and the first faint pipings — Tekeli-li — were heard from the west. Now it was time to find shelter, the best hiding place they could discover.

They were following the stream as it ran south down the mountainside. The decline was steep enough that it kept a fairly straight course, though it curled around the bases of some of the prominent hills and widened out in some of the more level hollers. He had reasoned that if the picture Echo had guided him to draw were indeed a ravine with a stream at the bottom, that water would almost necessarily be the same under which their cave was located and, if that were the case, it would be to the south where the force of its falling would have carved deeply between the hills.

That was a big if and Vern trusted his reasoning less than Moms did. She had more faith in him than he had in himself. Or perhaps she only pretended to, bolstering his confidence.

In any case, they must find a place to eat and sleep and to try to hide. Tonight was not as cold as last night and they would be warmer if they went into the woods a little way from the cold stream. He wanted to get some distance from the sound of it too, so that they might better hear anything moving through the forest.

That thin shrilling, the nerve-wracking piping of the shoggoths, had not come closer and Vern estimated that the group of them must be at least two kilometers away. The dreadful sound carried far, especially at night in these otherwise silent mountains. But the sound was close enough to cause Echo fearful distress.

He did not know if she had ever seen one of the creatures. Probably she had not, for the sound of their shrilling would recall their image and that would send her into paroxysms. He had seen them only once, two of them, as they fell upon a deer and did not devour so much as absorb it. Shapeless or nearly shapeless they were, composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and these would be about fifteen feet in diameter when spherical. Yet they had a constantly shifting shape and volume, throwing out temporary developments — arms, pseudopods, tentacles — and forming, deforming and reforming organs of sight and speech. Tekeli-li was the word, as nearly as Vern could approximate the sound with human phonemes, that they spoke to one another almost continuously, though the slight variations in pitch and timbre he was able to perceive suggested that this one utterance was capable of a plenitude of meanings. That word had been recorded by the old historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He had been stalking the same deer himself, a young doe that had not learned caution, and had been so horrified when the monsters burst out of the foliage upon their prey, that he swooned away for a few moments. That was a piece of good luck. If he had cried out, they would have made an end of him.

They would have ended the lives of Moms and Echo too — and of Queenie, for there was an intense detestation of those creatures for dogs and of dogs for them. Shoggoths, as the humans supposed, communicated telepathically with the Old Ones their masters, and the presence of Vern in that glade where the doe was ingested, or rather, digested, would have been made known. Then the Old Ones would come to search this part of the forest and they would unfailingly find Echo, though they might not comprehend the origin of her kind of mind-pictures.

Echo had tired of walking and clambering over the rocks and Vern and Moms had taken turns carrying her for the past hour or so. She was in Moms’ arms now and, as the four of them came to the edge of a large streamside boulder, Vern signaled for Moms and Echo to stay behind, while he searched for a suitable place to last out the night.

They had arrived at a fairly level place on the mountainside. The stream widened out here and was less voluble over its stones. If he could find a spot forty or so yards from its edge, they ought to be able to hear forest sounds clearly and to distinguish those that signaled danger. A cave would be ideal, but this place could offer nothing like that.

There was a dense laurel thicket bordering a ferny glade, and when he skirted it, he found a small opening. Echo would be frightened to crawl into this little tunnel in the foliage, but she would not be terror-stricken. He explored it for about fifteen yards and then could go no farther, the tightly meshed branches and twigs forming a prickly wall. Cozy, Vern thought. He realized that it had sheltered an animal not long ago, perhaps a fawn or maybe one of the black bears common in these hills. It would be a good place. Maybe they could even chance a tiny fire.

But when he brought the family inside this den, he decided against the fire. The smoke might not easily be visible at night, but they would have to crowd closely to the flame and Echo would be so transfixed by the sight of it that she might not be able to communicate. Flashing water, trembling fronds, twinkling lights — these sent her into a trancelike state, so fixedly that she could concentrate on nothing else.

So Vern and Moms tried their best to approximate the evening routine they had clung to when they lived in the cave. He crawled out of the brambly little tunnel to “scout,” while Moms primped Echo and combed her hair. Then Vern returned with a tin flask of water and Moms opened the canvas bag with the decal that read University Bookstore and brought out jerky for Vern and herself and smoked fish for Echo. Sometimes Echo’s teeth were painful and she would refuse to chew the dried deer meat.

After this meal, Vern and Moms arranged leaf piles for bedding. The fallen laurel leaves were thick here but made unsatisfactory mattresses, cold and slick and noisy. Uneasy sleep was guaranteed.

Now Moms took Echo in her arms and held her closely. This was their quiet time and Vern wanted to use it to question Echo, but he could not think how to ask what they needed to know.

“What voices do you hear inside?”

She shook her head, not meeting his eyes, and Vern looked to Moms for aid.

Moms said, “I know that we need to know what to look for, the source of the call or summons to her, but I don’t know how to ask, either.”

“If it is a person or a group of people, we must see them before they see us,” Vern said. “If we don’t like the look of them, we won’t make ourselves known.”

“But if we approach closely, they will sense we are there. It may be that they already know we are traveling toward their signal.”

“Shiny,” Echo murmured. Then she turned the word into a little song. “Shiny, shy-nee, shiny, shy- nee.” She was carefully not looking at Vern or Moms.

“Shiny?” Vern asked. “What is shiny, Echo?”

For a long time she only repeated the word, but at last added another. “Wall. Shiny, shy-nee wall. Shine wall.”

“Go there?” Vern asked. “Are we to go to a shiny wall?”

She nodded and looked at him and smiled. The picture in her mind of this shiny wall made her happy.

“Is it a too-bright?” Moms asked. “Does it hurt Echo’s eyes?”

Slowly she wagged her head no. “Wall of shy-nee,” she said.

“It must be a place,” Vern said. “Maybe a building.”

“Yes,” Moms said. “A structure of some kind. Are there any buildings positioned by a ravine that would not be built by the Old Ones?”

“I don’t know,” Vern said. “I had thought that all the human things in this area had been destroyed. Maybe it is not a building but a machine. If it looks like a wall to Echo, it could be a big machine.”

“Only the Old Ones have large machines now.”

“They would not be sending a call to Echo. If they knew where she was, we would already be killed.”

“Let us suppose that it is some sort of machine made by someone other than the Old Ones. If they wanted us to come to their machine, why didn’t they place it or send it close to where we were?”

“I don’t know,” Vern said. Then in a moment: “Maybe because if things don’t work out, if something goes wrong, we could still get back to our cave and be safe there, since the Olders don’t know about it. If this shiny wall was discovered by them, they would search close by and find our cave.”

“Perhaps,” Moms said. “Anyway, we have decided that we should answer the summons. Does the singing of the shoggoths seem to be getting closer to us? It may be that we need to find this shiny wall soon.”

“As soon as we can,” Vern said. “Let us try to get some rest.”

He had not said “sleep” and he suspected that Moms’s night was as unrestful as his own. Tekeli-li had sounded continuously and the shrillness came from different quarters. It seemed to be advancing upon them, but perhaps that was an illusion brought on by anxiety. Queenie did not behave as if shoggoths were closing in and Vern trusted her senses.

The morning routine matched that of the evening, except that Vern actually did scout, trying to make sure the area was free of traces of the Olders and to acquire an idea of the topography they were to travel through. He found a tall poplar with one branch low enough to give access to the upper branches and climbed easily. The months of outdoor survival had given him a wiry, purposeful musculature and a sureness of foot, hand, and eye. He was not even breathing heavily when he made it to the nearly leafless top and stood on a sturdy limb.

From here he could see the stream as it wound out of the holler, disappeared around a bend, and reappeared below, all whitewater and jumbled rock. Above the stream at that point reared a cliff, its level top a treeless, grassy sward. He decided it would be more informative to leave the streamside and climb along the ridges to that cliff. Even if it did not border the ravine shown in Echo’s map, it would offer a prospect of the southern reaches, so that if they did return to streamside, he would have some notion of where they were located in the forest.

Following the ridges would be no easy task, he thought, and indeed it was not. Echo found the trail-less climb hard going; she wanted to stop often and fix her attention on ragged leaves waving in the breeze upon ragged oak limbs. Then Moms would carry her for a while, shifting her from one arm to the other. And then Vern would carry, giving to Moms the book bag containing their provisions.

Still, they went forward, halting often to rest but then pushing on. Echo was not easy to manage, with so many new sights tugging at her faculties, but Vern and Moms got accustomed to her rhythms and Queenie showed canny trail-sense, finding openings and pathways that Vern would have overlooked.

A little after midday they came to a clearing full of goldenrod and orchard grass and Joe Pye weed and there, unexpectedly close, loomed the cliff face. There was a ridge leading close to the top on the western side; Vern thought that if they followed it at the rate of speed they had been making, they would gain the plateau before nightfall.

They did make pretty good time, but Vern had been deceived by the land-folds. The ridgeline led not to the cliff plateau but wandered off farther westward and there was no way to attain the top except by scrambling down to the very bottom and climbing the perilous-looking path that zigzagged up the face. Echo would not like those heights; the cliff looked to be about 250 feet high. She might struggle violently against being taken up, but their choices were nonexistent.

The climb was, however, steeper and more toilsome than he had counted on and, though Echo did not writhe and struggle, she refused to walk and proved a heavy burden. The day began to darken toward a chilly twilight and they had gotten only about halfway up. When they halted for a rest, Vern debated with himself whether to continue climbing or to go back down and find a night place.

Then when the ancient trail doubled back upward, there opened a hole in the cliff-wall, a cave that had not been visible from below because a projecting ledge hid it from the sightline. He motioned for Moms and Echo to stay in the trail and he and Queenie went toward the opening. Queenie sniffed all around the cave mouth, but she did not seem disturbed and Vern let her enter before him. The natural thing to fear in this spot was a rattlesnake den. Some of the caves in these mountains were filled with hundreds of serpents, coiled side by side among rocks and stretched out upon ledges. But Queenie went in without barking. She came out in a few minutes and gave Vern a quizzical gaze and he followed as she reentered.

This cave was handmade, like the path that had been carved into the cliff face. The Cherokee must have maintained this place to evade the soldiers that herded their nation so murderously westward. There were many hiding places like this, cellar- like holes dug out in the woods, large cubbyholes chopped into thorny blackberry thickets. In one of the latter Vern had found a flint hatchet. Other sites yielded shards of pots.

In here, though, he found no trace of the Cherokee and the one utensil was a pewter pitcher which lay in the deep dust. Disposed around it in disorder were eight skeletons. Three of these were of children and the others, to judge by size and structure, belonged to adults of varying ages. Clothing had rotted away, but remains of shoes and boots clung to the pedal bones of the adults. Two skeletons lay with some of the upper-body bones entangled, as if that couple had died in an embrace.

It was likely that they had died so. Vern imagined that here had come a family or an enclave of refugees from one of the scattered settlements; they would have been of like faith and resolve. They had killed themselves, Vern thought, and before him in the dust lay the pewter pitcher in which they has passed round the poison. This group of intimates had found it nobler and easier to die by their own hands than to be done in coolly, methodically, and agonizingly by the Old Ones — or in disgusting, viscous horror as victims of the shoggoths.

Here was a sorrowful sight and Vern spent a long minute in dark thought. There was a recess in the back of the cave, small but with adequate room to pile these bones in, and he did so, lifting them as carefully — and as tenderly — as he knew how. He deposited them in one place, all piled together, and mounded as much dust over them as he was able to gather. It was a sad task, but not the worst he had had to perform.

He felt that he ought to say some proper words over these rueful remains, but all that came to mind was the one familiar phrase and he mumbled it as he stood above the bones and poured over them a last scraping of dust.

“Rest in peace.”

Well, they had made up their minds to do that and now they rested. The task for Vern was to try to make sure they did not disturb Echo’s rest. If the toothy grins and hollow eye sockets frightened her, she might shriek for minutes, then moan for hours, rocking back and forth in Moms’ arms. She would not be able to communicate information about the shiny wall or anything else. He removed all the other traces he could find of the sad departed. He would warn Moms to keep Echo away from the back of the cave.

For the evening meal, they had only a little water left in the flask, barely enough to wash down their nine mouthfuls of food. It was insufficient to slake Echo’s thirst and she complained, whining and twisting her torso so that her makeshift dress was in danger of falling apart. Moms finally quieted her by crooning an improvised lullaby. Queenie got only a single strip of dried meat and no water. She was growing weak.

Vern and Moms were thirsty too — and hungry. Whatever the plateau might offer tomorrow, water and food must be found. How far could it be to the shiny wall of Echo’s vision? They could last only a few more hours without some replenishment. When their scanty food scraps ran out, they would share the fate of the last occupants of this cave, but in a more lingering fashion.

Unless they jumped.

Vern wondered about that misfortunate group. What had been the final straw, the situation that convinced them to effect their own ends? Might it have been the shrilling of the shoggoths, Tekeli-li, from the streamside below? His imagination failed in the attempt to picture those amorphous, globular agglutinations climbing the cliff side. Perhaps those people had heard the sound from above, from the cliff top that Vern and Moms and Echo and Queenie were trying to reach. That area looked treeless from below and those pursued would be exposed.

Best for Vern to reconnoiter the place just at day-break. He did not know whether he could summon the strength to climb the steep trail, observe the scene, and then return and lead the others there. He would have to decide about that in the morning; maybe sleep would refresh him sufficiently.

Echo was still resting in Moms’ arms. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be listening, though Moms had left off her lullaby. Vern crept over to them and murmured “shiny wall, shiny wall,” though he expected that Echo was too tired and sleepy to be able to converse.

She did respond, though, repeating Vern’s phrase in his own intonation. “Shiny wall.” Then she stopped and a lovely, quiet smile came to her face. To Vern, this was as surprising and delightful as a rainbow. Echo rarely smiled — almost never.

Then, before he could speak further, she fell asleep and Moms laid her down, just as she was, on the floor of the cave and stretched out to sleep beside her. Queenie slept, always with her head on her outstretched paws, and only Vern was awake.

And then he was not.

The skeletons came crawling toward them, of course, clacking their bones in this weary darkness in which their nasty, eternal grins glowed and flickered. Vern knew that he was dreaming and was not frightened. He tried to dismiss the dream so that he could sleep more soundly, but it persisted, its loathsome images and sounds ever more vivid until he woke with a start and looked instantly to see if Moms and Echo were safe.

They had not moved from where they had dropped, but their breathing was excited and irregular, and he knew that they too were dreaming, though probably not of skeletons. The three of them had gathered enough nightmare material to furnish out bad dreams for the remainders of their lives.

He lay still for a long time. Just before sunrise a wind sprang up and the mouth of the cave resounded with strange humming. Vern listened hard but could hear no whistling of shoggoths in the wind. If only this cave were near water, he thought, it would be ideal to live in.

Best not to dwell on fancies.

When the light was bright enough to make out details — the paws of Queenie protruding from beneath her nose, the porcelain-pale hands of Echo on her tatterdemalion dress — he sat up and began to move about.

It was not easy to do. His muscles were sore and his knees ached. It would be miraculous if he could get them to the top. Moms would be even more exhausted than he, so he would have to carry Echo the larger part of the way.

Yet let them rest now, he thought, as long as they are able. He rose and went out onto the cliff-side path. In the early light the stream below seemed far away and he saw how it ran southward into the shadow of another cliff on the other side. It came to him that if they reached the top and went south upon the plateau, they would find a place that matched the map that Echo had drawn.

Maybe it is not hopeless after all, he thought.

But when he reentered the cave and saw Moms ministering to Echo, massaging his sister’s swollen feet and crooning soothing encouragement, he felt anew the weight of the responsibilities he had taken on and doubt crept over his spirit. Moms and Echo looked at him expectantly and he made himself smile as he began to arrange their scanty breakfast.

And so, in a short few minutes, they were out of their shelter and struggling up the path that grew steeper with every step. Vern realized that they would have to stop often to rest and that the duty of mollifying Echo’s fear would grow more onerous, but there could be no turning back now.

The weather was in their favor, with a mild blue sky and little wind, even at this height, and they made better going than he had reckoned they would. At the last sharp turn before the top, Vern told Moms to stop for a rest and mind Echo while he went up to see what lay before them on the plateau.

The path they had been climbing was steeply graded, but the last eight feet or so had been cut into steps. These gave Vern an opportunity to peek over the edge, exposing only his head, so that his view of the prospect was at ground level. The area before him extended about fifty yards on three sides; the turf was short grass, composing what was traditionally called a “bald” in these mountains. At its south end was a long border of wildflowers — ironweed, jewelweed, bee balm, and the like — and these water-loving blooms held the promise of a spring. Beyond the flowers was a stand of low firs which cut off the long vista of the south.

There were no signs of shoggoths or other animals or of the Old Ones. A preternaturally peaceful silence reigned over this grassy bald.

Vern returned to the switchback in the path where Moms and Echo and Queenie waited. Moms was crooning earnestly to Echo, and Queenie snuggled against the pale girl, as if she, like Moms, were trying to stop Echo from looking down toward the stream.

Vern did not know why he whispered the report of his discoveries to his mother and sister. Maybe the information was too happy to speak of in normal tones. Moms whispered too: “Oh, I do hope there is water.”

“We will let Queenie go up first,” Vern said. “If there is water, she will find it.”

So it was Queenie who led the way to the gentle greensward, bounding up the weather-rounded steps and springing joyfully over the edge. By the time Vern brought Echo and Moms into the sky-tented field, the dog was already halfway to the border of flowers. She had smelled water.

Moms crawled onto the level surface, to sit cross-legged and receive Echo as Vern handed her up. Then Vern squirmed over too and the three of them sat for a few moments, to rest muscles and joints and to gaze back toward the way they had come, down the twinkling stream and over the tumbled, bushy hills, and through the shady glades and hollers to the foot of the treacherous but hospitable cliff. They shared a feeling of achievement. Whatever happened next, they had come this far safely, answering the summons. They had overcome great odds, greater than they had realized during their hard march.

Then Vern stood and turned toward the south and gazed upon a different world. Behind him was a landscape of forest, mountains, and green-blue valleys. Before him, beyond the flowers and the little firs, beyond the edge of this brief plateau, lay a vast panorama of immense, sky-spearing, cyclopean structures. So tall were these angular monuments, oblongs and cubes and spiry pyramids, that clouds obscured some of their tops. Their angles were all wrong, so that Vern experienced a fleeting vertigo.

Wrongness — that was the first salience that attacked his senses and his instincts. He could not estimate how far away these structures stood, piled one past the other in an infinitely regressing series, because they seemed to be erected in a different kind of space than that which obtained here on the plateau. They seemed also to inhabit a different kind of time, so that if you traveled toward them — that is, if you could travel toward them — you would leave behind the now you were in and stand in a different now, a kind of time to which your body, mind, and spirit were direly unsuited.

This knowledge flooded into his mind and gut all at once, as if from a suddenly unveiled black star.

He did not cry out; he did not swoon. But the sight of this monstrous, incomprehensible landscape, mindscape, was so alien that he fell to his knees. Then he fell forward on his hands, retching and heaving for breath and grasping the grass in his fingers as if these handfuls of turf were his only desperate handhold upon the planet.

I will not look up, he thought. I will not look at these things.

He heard from behind a muffled moaning and knew that Moms and Echo were gazing upon this nightmare prospect. It was Moms who had uttered that soul- stricken, heartsick moan. She was standing upright, hugging herself with both arms, and silver tears streamed gleaming upon her cheeks. There was an expression of desolate comprehension in her eyes. She must have known better than Vern could know what these gigantic shapes that crushed the southern horizon implied and that what was implied had to be the thing she most loathed and feared, except for the striking-down of her children.

“In their own image!” she cried.

Vern understood. The Olders were remaking the world, the whole planet, in accordance with their icy intellectual designs. They were not building machines and monuments upon the planetary surface; they were reconfiguring the molecular structures of the world, from core to crust, from pole to pole. Earth was in process of losing its identity. No longer would it be an earth; it would be an alien object, an implement or instrument, a tool whose purposes might be unimaginable.

Moms stood transfixed with horror, but Echo was not shrieking in terror, as Vern had supposed that she would be. She too was transfixed, but her expression was one of wonderment. Those unthinkably huge planes and angles and cleavages that folded inward and projected outward simultaneously in momentously slow formings and reformings exercised upon the autistic mind the same hypnotic fascination that a flickering light or a wind-trembled branch or a lightly dancing snowfall would produce. The fascination might be different by enormous degree, but it would not be different in kind from that which other and more familiar phenomena brought upon Vern’s sister.

When he saw that Echo did not lose herself in terror, that she was not beating her face with her fists as she did when fear was too terrible in her, Vern came to himself a little. Even with the calming image of Echo before him, it took an effort almost beyond his powers for him to collect his senses and something of his reasoning power.

He walked slowly to where Moms was standing and knelt and took the canteen from the book bag she had dropped in the grass. He grasped it in both hands and, keeping his gaze firmly turned toward the ground, never raising his eyes to the mind-wrenching panorama, trudged into the little marshy area outlined by the ranks of wildflowers.

In a minute or so, he came to a thin, oily streamlet that oozed among clumps of marsh-grassed turf. He bent and filled the flask and tasted the water. Musky and muddy, it was not toxic. He drank a little more before carrying the flask back to the females. Queenie bounded out of the herbage and trotted along beside him. No more than Echo was she disturbed by the sight of the world in ruin.

He fed Echo a grateful swallow at a time and she looked at him with her bright gray eyes brimming with gratitude. Moms seemed to find it difficult to drink; she rinsed her mouth and took the humus-tasting liquid in small sips. Then she dropped to the grass and stretched her legs out before her.

She spoke to the air and the grass when she said, “We cannot live in a world like this.” She shook her head. “At least, I cannot.” She looked up at her son, into his weather-lined face with its sparse blond beard. “I feel I am on the verge of losing my sanity. I was afraid we would have no future. Maybe we can have one, but I do not want it. And now I think we have no past either.”

“Last night we shared our shelter with some people who felt like you do,” Vern said.

“What do you mean? I don’t know what you mean. Don’t talk in riddles.” Her voice rose almost to a shout. “Say something that means something.”

He shrugged. “Maybe nothing means anything.”

He made himself look again, staring with renewed horror at the immensities of those grotesque cubes and cylinders, cube-clusters, and five-angled projections. His mind could not divide this phantasmagoric panorama into parts, but it seemed to him that gigantic bridges arched over seemingly limitless abysses. Those bridges did not attach to the surfaces they touched but penetrated into the stone with the continuous motionless movement that a great cataract of water presents to vision. The simultaneous opening and closing of the five-angled edges gave the impression that the matter of which those pinnacles were constructed was both material and immaterial. More dimensions than four were in play; that vertiginous rampart that struck its bulk over a half kilometer of empty space extended into time as well as into space. It was what it was — and yet it was in process of becoming what it already was, and becoming something other and beyond that also.

And it was all of a color that was no color at all.

Moms spoke more quietly than Vern had heard her speak before. “I cannot bear it,” she said. “No one can.”

Vern said, “Echo does not give up.”

He pointed to his sister. Echo was clapping her hands and swaying in an excited dance, her face full of joy. “Shy-nee shiny shiny shiny shy- nee,” she sang. She left off dancing and broke into a clumsy run. The air was bright there at the cliff-edge and Echo ran to enter into it, to plunge into empty space.

Tekeli-li.

This transliterated approximation was the closest Terran English could approach to the piercing command-trilling the Old Ones’ shoggoths made as they traveled, each telling its whereabouts to its sibling organisms. It had been anciently recorded in the unfinished narrative left by Arthur Gordon Pym and further attested by later writers and adventurers, and it always carried with it a nauseating feeling of dread.

Seeker held her face in her hands and drew deep, harsh breaths. She had not withdrawn from the Terran’s mind and the sound of that trilling had shaken her.

“How close are the shoggoths to the Remnant?” I asked.

She was silent a space, gathering her thoughts. Then she said she could not tell. “That sound is vivid in her mind because of her great fear, but I cannot judge distance.”

“Navigator?” I asked.

He studied his panel for some time. “Not so near as to be deadly, I think,” he said. “It is very difficult to judge distances.”

“We have found where this Remnant is,” I said. “We also have pictures from the locators. Where shall we set down the beacon?”

“Not so close as to attract the Old Ones to them nor so far that the autist cannot travel to it.”

“We must put the beacon down soon,” Seeker said, “so that it can set the Gate in place. I will have to go down to the planet surface.”

Three of us said no at once.

“The danger is too huge,” I said. “If the Old Ones are close, your mind could be erased. A shoggoth could sense what you are. If you are lost to us, the Remnant is lost and so are we.”

She looked at us steadily, each in turn. “If I do not exhibit myself in my own person, just as I have pictured me to the autist Echo and her queenie, they will not come through the Gate and we cannot bear them away. Then truly all will be lost.”

“How have you pictured you?” I asked.

“Looking as I do, but with all pleasantness and all welcoming and offering safety to the family. I have tried to picture myself happily to the queenie, but I do not know if she knows and interprets in the same manner as the others. She has strong smell-sense; I would like to transmit odors to her but cannot.”

“Are you certain it is needed for you to descend?”

“Yes,” Seeker said.

“There is no other way?”

She indicated no.

“Then let us rehearse the protocols and do all speedily,” I said, and once more and assiduously we bent to our tasks.

There was one procedure we could not rehearse.

If the Old Ones mind-touched Seeker, they would recognize our mission and why and how. Then they would try to trace us back and locate the Great Ones’ operational point for this mission. The disaster that followed would endanger and probably result in the slaughter of many races on many planets and the Old Ones would then take care that no Remnants were left. They would scour clean every planet and sun-system.

To prevent, I would kill Seeker. That is, I would order Ship to kill her before her mind could reveal its contents or before the Old Ones could assimilate. If the instruments detected that I did not emit the order quickly enough, Ship would enact its final program and detonate itself and all of us to atomic gas. There would be nothing left for the Old Ones to trace — but they would have been warned, and there would be consequences of that.

But Seeker declared that she must descend in her own person and not by image transmission to planet surface. She knew the minds we others could not know. And she would not imperil the mission needlessly. So I reviewed the steps and all seemed to be in order and we had to do everything quickly and with no mistakes.

There was a complication. Navigator had found a desirable site; the locators furnished detailed pictures of a green plateau above a river and the unactivated beacon was on its way, disguised, like Ship, as debris. It hurtled toward Terra, along with a flock of moon-chunks, and once it was surfaced, Ship would activate it for a brief time so that Seeker’s mind-signals could be amplified to the female telepath and directions would be vivid to her, though not a picture of the site, which Seeker explained would mean nothing or too much. Then the beacon would be deactivated, so as not to attract attention. When the time came, the exact moment, it would power up again and set the Gate in place and keep it open — again for the briefest of periods. In that short space, Seeker would appear to the autist and her queenie and welcome them through.

But Navigator was finding precise measurement difficult. We had thought that the distortion of the local space-weave was accidental, a product of the great inter-dimensional engineering the Old Ones were undertaking. As an ancillary quality, the distortion would remain constant and the anomalies could be taken into account. The distortion was increasing, Navigator told us, and he now thought it was not accidental. The Old Ones were transforming local space-time.

“They are not satisfied to remake the objects of the cosmos,” he said. “They are changing the makeup of the vessel that contains the cosmos. It begins with Terra and will spread, wave upon wave, throughout the whole universe. We will be unable to ascertain when or where anything is.”

“How can they change the nature of space without destroying themselves?” Doctor asked.

“I do not know,” Navigator said.

“Perhaps underspace will not be affected,” I said.

“And this transformation — if it is really taking place — will require a very long time to complete. We must rescue this Remnant promptly and return to the Great Ones. They will understand how to halt the process.”

“Perhaps,” Navigator said. His voice was doubtful. “I will try to work out a mathematics for the rate of distortion and we will follow our plan whether it is useful or not.”

“That is best,” I said because I could think of nothing else to say.

And then it was time for Seeker to go down. The beacon was in place and had already proved its worth. The Terran telepath had received Seeker’s pictures most clearly and Navigator reported that the family was marching toward the plateau. He suggested that we configure the beacon transceivers in a different way and thus access some of the energy the Old Ones were using to distort space-time. We could do so undetected, so much of that energy was surplus and not closely tabulated.

“It would require too long,” I said. “Those shoggoths are too near, are they not?”

He watched his screens and scopes for a little and then agreed.

Seeker went into the Gate-entrance chamber. She had freshened her robe and made her long hair brighter. Doctor and I kept our gazes upon each other, for though our sister strode into the exchange chamber steadily and with all purpose, we knew that she must have been enduring most horrible fears. She was descending into the territory of the Old Ones and she absorbed the terror of them ferociously, being in contact with the Remnant that survived just outside the verge of their icy intelligences and had witnessed what things they had done.

We tested the communications and Seeker said she could well hear me.

“Good,” I said, “because you must mark the instant for Navigator and for Ship. It has to be precisely exact.”

“I know.” She spoke bravely, but there was a quiver in her voice, only little, but it betrayed her slightly. I looked at Doctor and she was concerned but also smiled bravely to let me know Seeker would not lose consciousness.

We waited and waited but not, I now think, as long as it seemed we waited.

Seeker stood straight with her shoulders held back and her eyes glowing now with more color than ever I had seen in them. She brought her hands away from her sides and rested them slightly on the Gate posts.

Then she said, “Now,” and I will not forget the sound of that word, ever.

Ship heard and activated the beacon and the welcoming Shiny Wall-Gate was in place, so we thought.

Vern was certain that he could never get to her in time. He sprinted as hard as he could, but though Echo was severely uncoordinated and could often not walk in a straight line, she had a long head start. She was singing and babbling her Shiny Wall song and maybe that slowed her. Yet when he caught her, only inches from the fall that would crush her, and wrestled her to the turf, he had to use all his strength to hold her down. She struggled and cried and slapped at him. She was scarlet-faced and weeping but still singing, when she could find breath, “Shy-nee, shiny, shiny. ” Moms began wailing too, uttering a cry so full of grief and horror, that it chilled Vern even in the heat of his exertions.

And now in the midst of these commotions, Queenie came bounding past. Vern hardly had time to turn his head and follow her flight as she raced by him and the caroling Echo and launched herself, as if arcing into a lake to fetch a stick, over the cliff edge into the abyss.

Finally he was able to turn Echo on her back. He knelt on her, pinning her shoulders with his knees. She looked up at him with an expression of puzzled sorrow. “Shy-nee,” she said.

Then it was visible to Vern. It stood, or hovered, exactly upon the cliff edge, a rectangle of blue-white shimmer, mottled and interlaced with glowing threads that pulsed silver and violet and orange- red. It looked as if it ought to emit sound — a small sonic clap upon its appearance or the snap and sizzle of electronic static — but it was eerily silent. Vern could feel that no heat emanated from this object that Echo called a wall.

He took his weight off his sister and stood her up and clasped her tightly. She was not pushing him away now or attempting to run. She was transfixed, hypnotized by the shiftings and sparklings of the threaded workings upon or within the seemingly flat surface. She even nestled a little in his embrace as she often did with Moms.

Moms came behind Vern and put her arms around her shoulder, so that the three of them stood holding tight in mutual embrace. Vern wanted to speak to Moms but could not.

The girl who stepped out of Echo’s Shiny Wall resembled Vern’s sister in many ways. She was thin and her skin was pale as porcelain and her hair was bright blond, although it was not raddled and stringy like Echo’s but done up in feathery swirls that appeared to float about her head. She was wearing a white robe that cupped the sunlight into little pools of color, subtle yellows and blues.

Then she spoke in a clear, treble voice, her syllables like chimes. “You will be pleased to come away. The shoggoths are near. There is small time before the gate must shut.”

Echo laughed delightedly. Vern could say nothing and it was Moms who asked, in a quavering but determined tone, “Who are you?”

“I am Seeker. Echo knows who I am. You can see how she is not fearing. You must come. Now. They are almost upon us.”

Vern heard. They must have been advancing upon them from the north ridge. Tekeli-li Tekeli-li. Those beasts that looked like decomposing flesh could not come up the cliff-side path. They must have come along the other side of the bald.

Moms said, “We don’t know how. We are exhausted and frightened and you are strange to us.”

“You must trust me,” the girl said. “Your queenie is already aboard.”

“Queenie?”

“Please.”

The shrilling was very near. Tekeli-li.

“We have no choice, Moms,” Vern said.

Her voice was vacant. “Maybe you were right, Vern, to say that nothing means anything anymore. I don’t want to see this world the way it is now. How could anything be worse than what is here? So I will go first.”

She walked to stand by the girl in the white robe. The girl motioned her forward and Moms did not turn to look at Echo and Vern but stepped into the sheet of silver fire that opened over the abyss.

“Now — so as to avoid those Old One things,” the girl said.

Tekeli-li.

Almost upon the greensward, almost within sight. Echo was still frozen in fascination, so Vern scooped her up and carried her into the wall-sheet of energy and the girl in the colorful white robe followed, backing in and looking with horrified loathing at what was out there and then all that scene went away.

It was cold and sharp. It was like stepping through the waterfall that had protected their cave, except that it was not wet.

On the other side of the Shy-nee Wall was sleep.

Ship had changed the combination of gases so that our vessel atmosphere conformed more closely to the Terran. For us crew members, the heavier air was not unpleasant, but it was a little more difficult to breathe. We wanted our Remnant guests to be as comfortable as possible, for all must seem highly strange to them. We were in space, where the Old Ones ranged abroad. That would be threatening, we thought, maybe.

As soon as the necessities were done with, we all went to our deepsleep berths and Ship filtered in the proper narcotics and we plunged into underspace. This happened in the shortest of times. We did not know if we had been seen or, had we been, if we were traceable. We did not know if underspace were changed — or “wrecked,” as Navigator called it.

Ship was to awaken us after four periods. At that point, we would be one hundred watches’ flight from the Alliance Remnant Reclamation Consigning Base, a station located where a sun system formerly had revolved. The Old Ones had annihilated every planet and moon there and the dim little central star now hung alone. There were no outposts near this deserted space and it was a lonely place wherein to stand waiting and planning.

After the crew had been awakened, Echo and the queenie were brought to full consciousness and their needs attended to. They required more bodily attention than the young man and his mother. Seeker spent a long time period communicating with the animal — “dog,” it was classified — and the autistic female; they could all speak to each other in a rudimentary mental speech, and Echo, once she was assured that her mother and brother were alive and well, was happy. She no longer echoed, repeating the phrases and words and sounds of others. Now, with Seeker, she had her own voice.

Then Vern was wakened and he reported immediately that he felt wonderfully well. This was not surprising. Ship had massaged and exercised him and rid him of unhealthy microorganisms and prepared healthful, Terran-like food, which he ate with lavish enjoyment.

He asked a great many questions — as we had expected he would ask.

“You look so cool and white,” he said. “You seem delicate.”

“We were rescued from our home planet by the Radiance Alliance almost two of your years ago. We have been enclosed in the station and aboard ship since then. So we have not. planetary. physiques. But now, after we are restored to strength, we will be going to a world like the one you left, like ours that the Old Ones murdered. We will develop our physical nature on the new planet.”

“I like the clothes you gave me,” he said. “I never wore a robe before. It is comfortable and very pink. It is very pink.”

“I am glad you adore it,” I said.

“There are lots of things I do not understand,” he said. “I thought Echo would fall off the cliff and die. I thought Queenie had already fallen.”

I explained that the scene was arranged to deceive the foe. “Echo is an autistic and sees everything the way it really is. You and I see what we expect to see, but autistics do not see predicted patterns. The Old Ones see only patterns, all things arranged schematically. If they saw the grass blades depressed by the edge of the gate, they would attribute that to the wind bending them over. But it was the gate pressing down, though it was not yet visible. Echo saw what it really was and went through the gate to Seeker.”

“But the gate was visible,” Vern said. “It was silver, with other colors. I saw it.”

“Ship made it visual for you and your mother. Otherwise, you might not have entered.”

He was silent for a while. Then he said, “Thank you for rescuing us. Thank you for saving our lives.”

“It is our mission. In the world we are going to there are other Terralike Remnants hidden away. They were rescued too. The Alliance is trying to preserve as many species as possible. The greater number of them does not look like us.” I could not help smiling. “Some of them look very different.”

“Have you and the crew rescued many Remnants?”

“Only your family,” I said. “We were all apprehensive because we had no experience. We are immature.”

“What do you mean, immature?” Vern asked.

“In terms of Terran cycles, I am fifteen years old, Doctor is fourteen, Navigator is twelve, and Seeker is ten. We are orphans. We are Remnants, as you are. Our home was obliterated and we were rescued, though our escape was not so narrow as yours.”

Vern thought, then wagged his head. “Why would your Great Race send out children for such a mission? It seems not very brilliant.”

“But if we were adults and thought in complicated patterns, the way older beings do, the Old Ones could detect us more easily. They are not so closely attuned to the thought-patterns of children or of animals — or of autistic beings.”

“This is hard to take in,” Vern said.

“Is it not better for you here than it was on Terra?”

“Yes. May we wake Moms now?”

“She had to stay asleep longer. Her mind is more torn because the world she lived in so long is unrecognizable to her now. She will take longer to recover.”

“I had a sister younger than Echo,” Vern said. “Her name was Marta. The Old Ones destroyed her when they murdered my father. We could never say her name because we would cry and become too upset. That was not safe.”

Ship sounded some noises to signal that Moms had awakened.

Moms was sitting in a grand, plush chair shaped like a quarter moon beside her deepsleep rectangle. Queenie sat beside her in regal attitude. They looked as if they were granting audience. Moms’ robe was of a softer-looking material than Vern’s and Echo’s, a dark, peaceful blue. It lapped over Queenie’s paws. When she saw Vern and Echo and all the crew come to greet her, she began to laugh and cry. Her face formed different expressions and Vern saw how confused she was.

But she was happy.

“Oh children,” she said. “How fine you look! And you are all dressed up! Is there going to be a party?”

“I don’t know,” Vern said.

So Ship announced that a celebration was scheduled in two hours in the large conference bay. Everyone is invited, Ship said. Please attend. I am proud to know you.

“And we are all cosmically proud of Seeker,” I said. “She has done what all others could not.”

“I am awfully grateful,” Vern told her. “Is Seeker your real name?”

“In your English sounds, it would be something like Inanna,” I said.

He tried to pronounce it.

“Seeker,” I said, “say your name to Vern.”

“In a moment,” she said. She brushed the air with her hand. Her forehead was wrinkled and we knew she was mind-feeling something probably distant, but we could not know what.