Cthulhu's Reign

even if that happens, once the host is dead, the virus also will die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

REMNANTS Fred Chappell

I

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