Cthulhu's Reign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until Yuggoth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The only phenomenon that she could think of that would produce so violent a discharge was a nuclear