Future Lovecraft

RUBEDO, AN ALCHEMY OF MADNESS By Michael Matheson

THE STARS GLEAM like polished bone out on the galactic rim, edging up on the borderless black of deep space at the outer reaches of the Milky Way. There are graveyards there, celestial sepulchres of rotted hulks and ruined metal that drift in slow arcs through long orbits. It’s deathly cold on the rim. Light from distant stars diffuses before it reaches so far out, not enough of it left, by the time it hits those frigid boneyards of blasted metal, to warm what lies within.

Once, these trackless wastes of accordioned metal were home to smugglers and the kind of pirates who preyed on half-mad colonists keen to dare the endless black of the deeps and claim what lay beyond. But they died out long ago, or were driven off by the kind of men who claim a bounty for killing work. Now, only Eliana keeps silent vigil here, an accidental caretaker in this unhallowed place, where Death has walked with arms outstretched, gathering all unto him.

With the crash and sweep of Debussy’s “La Mer” flooding over the Lacrima’s speaker system on a loop, Eliana drifts in the arms of morphia, its hot bloom in her stomach and her bowels a balm to wounds that refuse to heal. Slumped, opiate-riddled in the grimy bucket seat of her not-quite-several-hundred-feet-long, decaying shuttle, cobbled together from the skeletal hulks of still-older wrecks, she dreams the face of her dead son.

She sprawls, tethered by fraying straps, in her pilot’s seat; enclosed in a full pressure suit of black metal and antiseptic cloth resembling nothing so much as a shroud. Only her helmet is off, the bulbous capstone floating several feet away and suspended in midair in the weightless cabin. Her head lolls one way and then another, hot tears orbing as they hit her cheeks and float off to make a starry sea of the darkness from the blank, black screens for the ship’s lateral and aft camera HUDs, arrayed around the closed shutters of the cabin’s forward viewport. She drifts between sleep and waking. Her face is grey and lined with age, framed by straggly locks of still-night-black hair. She has been out here on the edge of absolute darkness a long time.

Twitching and whimpering in her sleep, struggling against the straps that hold her down in the weightless cabin of her ship, Eliana is awakened with a start by her ship colliding with an interposing object. Her ship tumbles from its orbit, rolling with a groan of warping metal that sounds only within the confines of the shuttle as she comes to, wiping salty streaks from her face and gulping down air.

Debussy’s etheric, otherworldly strings and crashing cymbals drum against the cabin’s interior as Eliana reaches, bleary-eyed, for the con. She slams her palm down on its smooth, touch-sensitive face and blazing starlight floods into the ten-by-fifteen cabin as the main port’s reinforced titanium polymer shutters peel back, opening to the dizzy whirl of revolving space.

Eliana’s eyes skitter without purchase across the scene unfolding before her. A large section of her carefully maintained graveyard home is in disarray: Scythed halves of ships that were whole only a few hours before rip and tear at one another as they pass, shards of their ionised hulls floating free in the swirling maelstrom of shorn metal. Light is sent scattering everywhere from still-reflective surfaces in the spiraling, tumbling mess that her ordered world has become.

Shielding her eyes from the brightness, Eliana engages the cabin portal’s lumen filter and the light of the distant stars dials down to a bearably harsh brightness. Blinking away the seared patterns still emblazoned across her retinas, Eliana’s hands fly over the controls, her ship righting itself along the graveyard orbit’s lateral line at her command. Activating the ship’s lateral propulsion jets, she brings the Lacrima to a cruising halt, the ramshackle, jerry-rigged craft shuddering as it comes to a full stop and drifts into its regular orbit.

Eliana’s eyes scan the false horizon of the debris field, her eyes slitted against the stabbing rays of ultraviolet light, calculating the origin point of the disturbance. She has let her body fall to the tender mercies of entropy, but Eliana’s mind is still razor-sharp, dulled only slightly by the last vestiges of the morphine high. The simple trigonometric equation is no challenge for a woman who once designed interstellar starships and helped her people defy the laws of physics in their ever-hungering quest to transit beyond the known reaches of space. It has been a long time since her mind wandered these neural pathways, but the slow passage of twenty years falls away in an instant, leaving her mind awake and staggeringly fast.

The revitalisation of her faculties also awakens the grief etched deep in the seat of her hypothalamus. Firming the line of her jaw and forcing it to stop quavering, Eliana sets that pain aside and focuses on the task at hand.

She plots the trajectory of the inciting object that has thrown her celestial cemetery into chaos. She can’t make out which piece of debris it is that has been sent hurtling like an eight-ball through the dense debris field, so she settles on tracing its wake back to the point of origin. The trail is easy to follow: A wide avenue of disturbed particles drifts out in an ever-expanding cylindrical radius. Eliana manoeuvres the Lacrima into the pathway, the ship’s capacious bulk sending small driftwood bundles of metal scattering, as the distorted shadows of tumbling objects trail across the portal and the cabin within like clutching, lingering fingers.

All light is blotted out by something unutterably immense at the end of the tunneling pathway, the route widest here at the edge of its inception, as Eliana comes to the edge of her debris field. Beyond the field floats the absolute darkness beyond the rim, lit only by the weak blaze of stars distant beyond dreaming, beyond the scope of human lifetimes. Here, on the edge of known light where human understanding falters, time is measured in celestial reckonings.

Eliana strains her eyes to see what thing it is that lies against the light, not backlit, instead obscuring all the light behind it as though drinking it in. Her eyes struggle to focus on the shape, but she cannot wrap her mind around its contours. The interposing object is composed of too many angles and lines that seem to warp and bleed off into the edges beyond seeing as she tries to follow them. It hurts her head to watch those inchoate lines that seem never to actually terminate. She looks away and shuts her eyes until the image clears from her mind’s eye.

Rubbing at the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, and opening her eyes once more, Eliana is careful not to look directly at the juxtaposed, form-defying shadow. Instead, she stares at the space around the deeper blackness, calculating size and mass, exhaling in awe.

The object, whatever it is, appears to be several thousand feet in length, and maybe a third of that high. And there is something roughly familiar in the design. A subtle curvature and overall aerodynamic sense to the obscuring presence that makes Eliana think back to the days when she studied propulsion engineering and hull design theory. She drums the fingers of one hand along the con panel before her while she contemplates the alien object, letting her hand fall silent as she decides that the massive, light-blotting horizontal obelisk is a craft.

Determined to prove her theory right, Eliana straightens in her pilot’s seat and activates the Lacrima’s massive aft propulsion jets, salvaged from a derelict Saturn V rocket. Their immense roar is silent in the frictionless space, but sets the interior of the ship to shuddering violently as Eliana steers her craft around the protruding edge of the alien object.

The Lacrima clears the obscuring edge of the alien craft’s length while Debussy swells over the ship’s speakers, rising into the middle section of the third movement of “La Mer”—the “Dialogue du vent et de la mer. Animé et tumultueux”—and Eliana is forced to slit her eyes when a baleful, red glow envelops the entirety of the ship’s cabin. On this side of the obscuring object, a deep, crimson pulsing blurs the light of distant stars. Like a breathing eye, the pulsing orb inhales and exhales light, the red shift deepening and paling sequentially.

Eliana screws her eyes shut and turns her face away from the overwhelming ruddy light, blindly swatting at the con panel, her fingers sighted, even in self-imposed darkness, through long practice. The Lacrima’s main viewport filters out the burning red shift and Eliana opens tear-streaked eyes, blinking away the stinging salt. Her newly opened eyes focus on the strange shape before her, webbed to the side of the still-all-but-invisible craft.

The thing attached to the side of the ship is hard to focus on, at first. It is roughly circular in shape, rising in an imperfect half-dome from the hull of the drifting, possibly derelict ship, and seemingly translucent. The hazy, ill-defined bulbous contusion on the alien ship’s hull runs the height of the craft and stretches over a quarter of its length, the enormity of the canker mind-boggling. The more Eliana focuses on the strange shape, the more she realises that it is not the dome that is red, but something within—something that pulses and breathes. Something that moves within the confines of the space, tentacled limbs roving and thrashing in amniotic dreaming.

With a Pavlovian reaction that tears at her gut and opens the floodgates of her memory, letting loose a torrent of buried images and sensations tied to the child who once gestated in her own womb, Eliana realises that the thing attached to the side of the alien craft is an egg. Her stomach dry-heaving, hand across her mouth, Eliana struggles to subdue the raging floodwaters crashing through her mind: images of her son laughing; his tiny hand in hers; his first step across bare, clattering floorboards; the soft, downy smell of him in the spring air; his first breath in an antiseptic hospital; his last, choking gasp for air as he convulsed and simply slipped away, cradled in her arms, her hot tears running through his hair and down into his staring eyes; his unmoving flesh clutched to her breast.

These and innumerable other moments, captured in refracted amber, steal the breath from her lungs and now, she does disgorge the contents of her stomach, what little there is in it rushing up as bile and sluicing out over her lips to blob and float away. Followed by tears that do likewise and choking sobs that echo in the small confines of the Lacrima’s cabin.

As Eliana cries, the tendrils of the thing inside the egg cease moving and it pulses once, deeply. For a few moments, it is silent, utterly still, as Eliana is wracked with the outpouring agony of her long-repressed grief. And then, all the tentacles of the immense, spacefaring entity thunder against the egg’s outer membrane at once, releasing a torrent of gravimetric waves that traverse the empty space between the alien craft and the Lacrima, slamming up against the pitted, already-cracked surface of the decaying vessel.

Eliana rocks in her straps as her ship shakes violently in the gravimetric storm. And then, one of the straps, long overdue for replacement, tears and she is hurtling through the cabin to smash up against the open viewport at the front of the cabin. Her head cracks sharply against the well-reinforced, poly-paned glass. And then there is only silence.

In the darkness in which she floats, there is a voice. It is her son’s. She knows this without thinking. It is as automatic a recognition as the ceaseless, effortless work of breathing. Eyes opening on a vast plane of darkness where no stars lie, she sees herself floating, then comes to stand upright on an unseen sense of solidity beneath her.

Her son is before her, rushing toward her, his small legs pumping quickly across illusory, solid terrain that cannot be seen, but is nonetheless felt. But Eliana has been here, before. She knows the illusion for what it is, even in this state, somewhere between dream and memory. Always, always in her mind is the knowledge of his death. Ingrained so deeply that neither sleep nor dream can steal the knowledge from her. She holds herself erect, dream eyes closed as her dead son throws his arms around her and holds her tight. She clenches her jaw and looks away from the small, thick arms cradled around her upper thighs and the warm, soft head nestled up against her navel.

Again, she damns her subconscious mind for thinking this will bring her peace or a measure of comfort. Doesn’t her symbol-ridden sense of self understand that nothing will ever be right again?

She keeps her eyes shut against the sight of her long-dead child, but opens them when the arms pull back and the warmth of him moves away. That’s new. Confused, Eliana opens her eyes. Before her stands her son, his head cocked at an angle, his body naked and pristine, so unlike the actual state of him in death, when the lesions had blossomed on his rosy flesh and his skin had rotted away in great weeping chunks. But there is something wrong with him, here. Something…different.

Eliana stares, unable to take her eyes from her dead son as he twitches, shudders and then convulses uncontrollably. She stands, rooted to the spot, unable to move her body, though every muscle screams to run to him and cradle his spasm-ridden body. Before her eyes, he throws up one tentacle, then two, then three, until his mouth is full with the thickness of a fungal bloom of cephalopod tendrils. He chokes on them, as she screams, and then tendrils are bursting through all of his skin, ripping it aside in order to be free of the cage of still-mortifying flesh.

She cannot stop screaming.

She is still screaming as she awakens, the sound loud in the silence of the Lacrima’s cabin. Debussy no longer plays over the collapsed speaker system, the ship’s silent collision alarm awake and blaring in swift, repeating, red pulses of light that mimic those generated by the entity now raucously beating at the shell of its cage, drifting between her ship and the debris field far beyond. Blood wells and orbs from a deep gash in her forehead, and her vision swims, but suddenly, Eliana understands, watching the tentacled entity beat at the cage.

It is trying to birth, but cannot free itself. And through the haze of her own floating blood, Eliana sees not the trapped tentacled entity, but knows it for what it truly is. Her son has come back to her. He has found her at long last. Tears well in her eyes, but now, after twenty years, finally, she sheds tears of joy. Her son has come back to her.

Eliana sets her jaw, straightens her spine and pushes off the cracked viewport with one steady hand. She floats her way back to the cabin’s pilot seat and settles in as best she can, grabbing for the helmet that dances away from her in the weightless air, everything bathed in the intermingled glaring reds of the struggling entity and the Lacrima’s alarm system. She adjusts the helmet over her head and snaps it shut with a violent twist, her suit filling with refiltered air. She closes her right eye against the sudden rush of properly flowing blood as it courses down her face, filling one half of her vision. Strobe-lit orbs of her blood still speckle the cabin, intermingling with the ever-present sparkle of her globular tears, filling the otherwise-empty space.

With the barest nudge on the control panel, Eliana sets the Lacrima’s impelling engines roaring to life and the battered ship slides forward, gaining momentum as she revs the hulk up to ramming speed. With a look of absolute joy on her face, Eliana sends the Lacrima slamming into the immense, tentacled creature’s egg, shattering it. Sheer portions of the collapsing egg fall away and shear sections of the Lacrima from the main body of the hull, opening parts of the engine room and auxiliary fuel dumps to the void of space. A thick, black, quickly-globuling leak of engine coolant and fuel bleeds out into space as the ship depressurises and portions of the hull begin to crumple inward.

Eliana is thrown forward from her seat by the collision and slams up against the cabin view-port, this time full-bodied. She lingers there, watching the tentacled foetus within the egg breach, its massive tendrils ripping at the collapsing barrier. With each stroke, it reveals itself more fully until it is free.

She watches as her son stretches tendrils to the distant stars, light radiating from its pulsing, burning core. Radiative heat boils off the stellar entity, its external membrane burning a bright, pulsing red. Eliana forces her eyes to stay open as her retinas burn with the brightness of her son’s awesome new form. A swell of pride blooms up within her. His new body will not succumb to the ravages of disease, nor age, nor infirmity. Here, in the limitless black of space, he will live, undying.

For a moment, the tentacled stellar creature swells, drinking in the ambient radioactive energy of the deep black around it. And then it turns its spherical mass upon the wreck of the Lacrima, the ship collapsing in segmented stages, one portion of the hull after another crumpling in like an accordion. Drawn by the bleeding heat and light of the dying ship, and the meager warmth of the entity within, the interstellar entity falls on the crumpling hulk and wraps it in a tentacled embrace.

As the cabin is bathed in burning, pure-red light, the tentacled mass of her newly reborn child crushing up against the already-weakened glass, Eliana exults in her son’s final embrace. Metal crumples and folds in on itself in sharp, swift strokes, pinning her and crushing the breath from her lungs. And as the tentacles scythe through the hull and find purchase on her form and close tight around her, cracking bone and turning muscle to pulp, one thought repeats endlessly in Eliana’s mind.

He has come back to her.