Cthulhu's Reign

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

Even so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we all vampires now?

But the real questions were still how and by whom?

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

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

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

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

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