Cthulhu's Reign

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.

III

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