The Book of Cthulhu

The Unthinkable

Bruce Sterling

Since the Strategic Arms Talks of the early 1970s, it had been the policy of the Soviets to keep to their own quarters as much as the negotiations permitted—in fear, the Americans surmised, of novel forms of technical eavesdropping.

Dr. Tsyganov’s Baba Yaga hut now crouched warily on the meticulously groomed Swiss lawn. Dr. Elwood Doughty assembled a hand of cards and glanced out the hut’s window. Protruding just above the sill was the great scaly knee of one of the hut’s six giant chicken legs, a monstrous knobby member as big around as an urban water main. As Doughty watched, the chicken knee flexed restlessly, and the hut stirred around them, rising with a seasick lurch, then settling with a squeak of timbers and a rustle of close-packed thatch.

Tsyganov discarded, drew two cards from the deck, and examined them, his wily blue eyes shrouded in greasy wisps of long graying hair. He plucked his shabby beard with professionally black-rimmed nails.

Doughty, to his pleased surprise, had been dealt a straight flush in the suit of Wands. With a deft pinch, he dropped two ten-dollar bills from the top of the stack at his elbow.

Tsyganov examined his dwindling supply of hard currency with a look of Slavic fatalism. He grunted, scratched, then threw his cards faceup on the table. Death. The Tower. The deuce, trey, and five of Coins.

“Chess?” Tsyganov suggested, rising.

“Another time,” said Doughty. Though, for security reasons, he lacked any official ranking in the chess world, Doughty was in fact quite an accomplished chess strategist, particularly strong in the endgame. Back in the marathon sessions of ’83, he and Tsyganov had dazzled their fellow arms wizards with an impromptu tournament lasting almost four months, while the team awaited (fruitlessly) any movement on the stalled verification accords. Doughty could not outmatch the truly gifted Tsyganov, but he had come to know and recognize the flow of his opponent’s thought.

Mostly, though, Doughty had conceived a vague loathing for Tsyganov’s prized personal chess set, which had been designed on a Reds versus Whites Russian Civil War theme. The little animate pawns uttered tiny, but rather dreadful, squeaks of anguish, when set upon by the commissar bishops and cossack knights.

“Another time?’’ murmured Tsyganov, opening a tiny cabinet and extracting a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. Inside the fridge, a small overworked frost demon glowered in its trap of coils and blew a spiteful gasp of cold fog. “There will not be many more such opportunities for us, Elwood.”

“Don’t I know it.” Doughty noted that the Russian’s vodka bottle bore an export label printed in English. There had been a time when Doughty would have hesitated to accept a drink in a Russian’s quarters. Treason in the cup. Subversion potions. Those times already seemed quaint.

“I mean this will be over. History, grinding on. This entire business”—Tsyganov waved his sinewy hand, as if including not merely Geneva, but a whole state of mind—“will become a mere historical episode.”

“I’m ready for that,” Doughty said stoutly. Vodka splashed up the sides of his shot glass with a chill, oily threading. “I never much liked this life, Ivan.”

“No?”

“I did it for duty.”

“Ah.” Tsyganov smiled. “Not for the travel privileges?”

“I’m going home,” Doughty said. “Home for good. There’s a place outside Fort Worth where I plan to raise cattle.”

“Back to Texas?” Tsyganov seemed amused, touched. “The hard-line weapons theorist become a farmer, Elwood? You are a second Roman Cincinnatus!”

Doughty sipped vodka and examined the gold-flake socialist-realist icons hung on Tsyganov’s rough timber walls. He thought of his own office, in the basement of the Pentagon. Relatively commodious, by basement standards. Comfortably carpeted. Mere yards from the world’s weightiest centers of military power. Secretary of Defense. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Secretaries of the Army, Navy, Air Force. Director of Defense Research and Necromancy. The Lagoon, the Potomac, the Jefferson Memorial. The sight of pink dawn on the Capitol Dome after pulling an all-nighter. Would he miss the place? No. “Washington, D.C., is no proper place to raise a kid.”

“Ah.” Tsyganov’s peaked eyebrows twitched. “I heard you had married at last.” He had, of course, read Doughty’s dossier. “And your child, Elwood, he is strong and well?”

Doughty said nothing. It would be hard to keep the tone of pride from his voice. Instead, he opened his wallet of tanned basilisk skin and showed the Russian a portrait of his wife and infant son. Tsyganov brushed hair from his eyes and examined the portrait closely. “Ah,” he said. “The boy much resembles you.”

“Could be,” Doughty said.

“Your wife,” Tsyganov said politely, “has a very striking face.”

“The former Jeane Seigel. Staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

“I see. The defense intelligentsia?”

“She edited Korea and the Theory of Limited War. Considered one of the premier works on the topic.”

“She must make a fine little mother.” Tsyganov gulped his vodka, ripped into a crust of black rye bread. “My son is quite grown now. He writes for Literaturnaya Gazeta. Did you see his article on the Iraqi arms question? Some very serious developments lately concerning the Islamic jinni.”

“I should have read it,” Doughty said. “But I’m getting out of the game, Ivan. Out while the getting’s good.” The cold vodka was biting into him. He laughed briefly. “They’re going to shut us down in the States. Pull our funding. Pare us back to the bone, and past the bone. ‘Peace dividend.’ We’ll all fade away. Like MacArthur. Like Robert Oppenheimer.”

“‘I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,’” Tsyganov quoted.

“Yeah,” Doughty mused. “That was too bad about poor old Oppy having to become Death.”

Tsyganov examined his nails. “Will there be purges, you think?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I understand the citizens in Utah are suing your federal government. Over conduct of the arms tests, forty years ago…”

“Oh,” Doughty said. “The two-headed sheep, and all that. There are still night gaunts and banshees downwind of the old test sites. Up in the Rockies… Not a place to go during the full moon.” He shuddered. “But ‘purges’? No. That’s not how it works for us.”

“You should have seen the sheep around Chernobyl.”

“‘Bitter wormwood,’” Doughty quoted.

“No act of duty avoids its punishment.” Tsyganov opened a can of dark fish that smelled like spiced kippered herring. “And what of the Unthinkable, eh? What price have you paid for that business?”

Doughty’s voice was level, quite serious. “We bear any burden in defense of freedom.”

“Not the best of your American notions, perhaps.” Tsyganov speared a chunk of fish from the can with a three-tined fork. “To deliberately contact an utterly alien entity from the abyss between universes… an ultrademonic demigod whose very geometry is, as it were, an affront to sanity… that Creature of nameless eons and inconceivable dimensions….” Tsyganov patted his bearded lips with a napkin. “That hideous Radiance that bubbles and blasphemes at the center of all infinity—”

“You’re being sentimental,” Doughty said. “We must recall the historical circumstances in which the decision was made to develop the Azathoth Bomb. Giant Japanese Majins and Gojiras crashing through Asia. Vast squadrons of Nazi juggernauts blitzkrieging Europe… and their undersea leviathans, preying on shipping….”

“Have you ever seen a modern leviathan, Elwood?”

“Yes, I witnessed one… feeding. At the base in San Diego.” Doughty could recall it with an awful clarity-the great finned navy monster, the barnacled pockets in its vast ribbed belly holding a slumbering cargo of hideous batwinged gaunts. On order from Washington, the minor demons would waken, slash their way free of the monster’s belly, launch, and fly to their appointed targets with pitiless accuracy and the speed of a tempest. In their talons, they clutched triple-sealed spells that could open, for a few hideous microseconds, the portal between universes. And for an instant, the Radiance of Azathoth would gush through. And whatever that Color touched-wherever its unthinkable beam contacted earthly substance-the Earth would blister and bubble in cosmic torment. The very dust of the explosion would carry an unearthly taint.

“And have you seen them test the bomb, Elwood?”

“Only underground. The atmospheric testing was rather before my time….”

“And what of the poisoned waste, Elwood? From beneath the cyclopean walls of our scores of power plants…”

“We’ll deal with that. Launch it into the abyss of space, if we must.” Doughty hid his irritation with an effort. “What are you driving at?”

“I worry, my friend. I fear that we’ve gone too far. We have been responsible men, you and I. We have labored in the service of responsible leaders. Fifty long years have passed, and not once has the Unthinkable been unleashed in anger. But we have trifled with the Eternal in pursuit of mortal ends. What is our pitiful fifty years in the eons of the Great Old Ones? Now, it seems, we will rid ourselves of our foolish applications of this dreadful knowledge. But will we ever be clean?”

“That’s a challenge for the next generation. I’ve done what I can. I’m only mortal. I accept that.”

“I do not think we can put it away. It is too close to us. We have lived in its shadow too long, and it has touched our souls.”

“I’m through with it,” Doughty insisted. “My duty is done. And I’m tired of the burden. I’m tired of trying to grasp issues, and imagine horrors, and feel fears and temptations, that are beyond the normal bounds of sane human contemplation. I’ve earned my retirement, Ivan. I have a right to a human life.”

“The Unthinkable has touched you. Can you truly put that aside?”

“I’m a professional,” Doughty said. “I’ve always taken the proper precautions. The best military exorcists have looked me over…. I’m clean.”

“Can you know that?”

“They’re the best we have; I trust their professional judgment…. If I find the shadow in my life again, I’ll put it aside. I’ll cut it away. Believe me, I know the feel and smell of the Unthinkable—it’ll never find a foothold in my life again….” A merry chiming came from Doughty’s right trouser pocket.

Tsyganov blinked, then went on. “But what if you find it is simply too close to you?”

Doughty’s pocket rang again. He stood up absently. “You’ve known me for years, Ivan,” he said, digging into his pocket. “We may be mortal men, but we were always prepared to take the necessary steps. We were prepared. No matter what the costs.”

Doughty whipped a large square of pentagram-printed silk from his pocket, spread it with a flourish.

Tsyganov was startled. “What is that?”

“Portable telephone,” Doughty said. “Newfangled gadget. I always carry one now.”

Tsyganov was scandalized. “You brought a telephone into my private quarters?”

“Damn,” Doughty said with genuine contrition. “Forgive me, Ivan. I truly forgot that I had this thing with me. Look, I won’t take the call here. I’ll leave.” He opened the door, descended the wooden stair into grass and Swiss sunlight.

Behind him, Tsyganov’s hut rose on its monster chicken legs, and stalked away—wobbling, it seemed to Doughty, with a kind of offended dignity. In the hut’s retreating window, he glimpsed Tsyganov, peering out half-hidden, unable to restrain his curiosity. Portable telephones. Another technical breakthrough of the inventive West.

Doughty smoothed the ringing silk on the top of an iron lawn table and muttered a Word of power. An image rose sparkling above the woven pentagram-the head and shoulders of his wife.

He knew at once from her look that the news was bad. “Jeane?” he said.

“It’s Tommy,” she said. “What happened?”

“Oh,” she said with brittle clarity, “nothing. Nothing you’d see. But the lab tests are in. The exorcists—they say he’s tainted.”

The foundation blocks of Doughty’s life cracked swiftly and soundlessly apart. “Tainted,” he said blankly. “Yes… I hear you, dear….”

“They came to the house and examined him. They say he’s monstrous.”

Now anger seized him. “Monstrous. How can they say that? He’s only a four-month-old kid! How the hell could they know he’s monstrous? What the hell do they really know, anyway? Some crowd of ivory-tower witch doctors…’’

His wife was weeping openly now. “You know what they recommended, Elwood? You know what they want us to do?”

“We can’t just… put him away,” Doughty said. “He’s our son.” He paused, took a breath, looked about him. Smooth lawns, sunlight, trees. The world. The future. A bird flickered past him.

“Let’s think about this,” he said. “Let’s think this through. Just how monstrous is he, exactly?”

∇