Cthulhu's Reign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And this is the end?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would probably be painful if any bat ever got to bite into him or any snake were to swallow him whole, but