My scalp prickled. I wouldn’t have chosen to greet Barlow’s team red-eyed and sweaty, wearing the previous day’s rumpled dress.
Fortunately they were distracted. I’d missed Barlow and Peters’s first encounter with the Outer Ones—though it must have gone well since both seemed cognizant of their surroundings. (Would the talismans that protected them against the Yith also defend against the Outer Ones’ mental arts? I made a note to ask Mary if we might bargain for extras.) But I did get to see them gape at the elders. Spector, who knew my grandfather already, nodded at him easily and proffered a bulging paper bag, smelling of yeast and fish.
“Thank you,” said Charlie fervently. I took a bagel thickly caked with poppy seeds and garlic, and a slice of smoked salmon, artifacts of a sunlit world above where bodily needs were treated as commonplace.
Grandfather extended his hand and waited while Barlow made up his mind to shake it. Green scales enveloped pink skin. Talons scraped close. “I’m Obed Marsh. I’ve heard much about you.” He bared his teeth. “You were impolite to my granddaughter, this past winter.”
Barlow glanced my way. “I apologized.”
“And so you should have.” A gentler smile, though Barlow might not recognize it as such. Peters, he pointedly did not address.
“My grandfather and S’vlk came here last night,” I told them. I hoped the others would follow my lead in omitting S’vlk’s title. “They also wanted to meet the Outer Ones’ companions.”
“And learn more about this expansion of their territory.” S’vlk wasn’t trying to be menacing, but the men stepped back anyway. Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt and Nnnnnn-gt-vvv—I assumed, I still couldn’t tell them apart—watched this interplay. They drew nervous looks, but never that easy dance of body language, negotiating for space and status. For all the difference between air and water, we apes understood each other.
“You gave us twenty-five names,” said one of the Outer Ones. “Of those, twenty-three are among our companions, and seventeen are here today. We’ll introduce you to them, and they can assure you of their well-being.”
Our route avoided the room where the bodies lay, and I was grateful. In the conversation pit, the agents split up to speak with several humans, some accompanied by Outer Ones and some on their own. The room dampened noise, so that I heard only the occasional voice raised in anger or enthusiasm. One of the Outer Ones found me near the lip of the bowl.
“Speak with me,” it said.
I looked for the elders, wondering why it would choose me when more experienced negotiators were available. I fell back on etiquette. “What can I do for you?”
“You understand the cities of the sea. Humans there live, if not in peace, then with the moderation and adaptation needed to preserve themselves in the face of change. You believe you’ll survive so long as this world remains habitable, and it seems plausible.”
“We know we will.” But of course the Outer Ones didn’t trust the testimony of the Yith—and, if they never went to the Archives, would never read the firsthand testimony.
“But you’re also working with these state agents. You understand the drives that push them toward extinction.”
“We know something will.” Understand was too strong a word. “It doesn’t seem fair to blame them for those drives. All species pass, sooner or later.”
“We endure, because we change.” A soft chitter, underscoring the ubiquitous buzz. “You don’t recognize me, do you? I’m Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt.”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to learn to tell you apart.”
“Yet you cannot bear to look at our wings.”
There was no answer but to look at them. It felt like staring at an eclipse, too bright and too dark at once. My vision blurred, and I had to look away. “If there are clues there, my eyes aren’t made to see them. I’m sorry.”
“You haven’t decided to be ready. But you needn’t pretend—just ask who you’re talking to. We’re all different people, and I’d like to think that matters to you.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll ask.” I shook my head. “You wanted to talk about men of the air?”
“Yes. I want to know how long you believe they’ll endure.”
I shook my head. “There are events we believe still lie in humanity’s future. But we could be wrong—we could have missed them. Or they could be brief, empires that rise and fall in the space of a month, leaving a swift deep scar on history. There could be population crashes sufficient to drive us from the land—and once gone, we won’t be able to return.”
“I don’t want an answer based on your patchy histories of the future. Based on your own observation.”
It seemed hubristic to answer. “Men of the air are growing more dangerous to themselves. A moment of foolishness at the wrong time, or a moment of wisdom at the right, could decide between extinction and a million more years of history. But why are you asking me? You boast of seeing so many species live and die.”
“It’s your species. The Deep Ones are eternal observers—from your limited vantage point, you see much.” A ripple of something painful on the edge of my vision. “The question is a point of contention among our colonists here. People on all sides cite the same points you do.”
Freddy had told me to ask: “And what do you believe?”
“That humanity is at risk, but can be saved.”
I thought the same—but couldn’t believe we were in perfect accord. “Saved how? By whom?”
“That depends. Maybe you can do it on your own. Maybe you need help.”
“What kind of help?”
Tentacles stretched and contracted. “What do you think you need?”
Perhaps they were asking me because I was unprepared. I had enough power to make agreements, but was too inexperienced to avoid the perils. If I got nothing else out of this conversation, I was gaining experience. I parried the question. “You call us observers, but you claim to have been on Earth since before we painted caves. What do you see, that we might miss?”
Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s body seemed to settle among spindled limbs. “There are the obvious danger signs, of course. Fission weapons, and fusion soon. The immediate destruction isn’t even the issue, so much as mutations to fragile genetic structures. Then there are the industrial scars: changes to air composition, temperature ranges, agricultural capacity. Humans can be responsible as individuals, but as a species you’ve no institutions to coordinate stewarding your ecology.”
“We’re capable,” I said.
“I think so. But these are the obvious threats—any species that wasn’t alarmed by them wouldn’t be smart enough to build them in the first place. If a species survives carbon-based industries and city-killer weapons, it’s by developing some method of stewardship. But that takes trust. And here, we have observed a pattern: you can predict such trust by how a species uses weaker magic. That’s where humans, on their own, fail.”
“Men of the air barely use magic at all.” Perhaps that was the problem. For me, magical practice forced perspective, a patience that didn’t come naturally. For Caleb, who scarcely remembered a community before the camps, the confluence offered a bone-deep trust that his bitterness couldn’t smother.
“But we’ve seen how you use it when you do,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. “Magic by its nature blurs the boundaries between individuals. The trapezohedron lets us share a thousand points of view, understanding that transcends any one set of senses. Every vision conveys what a real person sees, or once saw.”
That view of R’lyeh, guards rising in response to … what? “One of you?”
“Yes, but not the way you mean. Freddy is one of us, and Shelean, and all our travel-mates. Species is meaningless to our community.”
I should not have, but— “You make no distinction between Outer Ones and captive minds?”
“They’re no such thing.” I sought anger or amusement in Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s mild tone, but could read its voice no better than its body. “We share our abilities and knowledge willingly—that’s an end in itself, not just a side effect of some abstract search for knowledge.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t intend any offense.”
Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt bent its head toward me, and I froze as tendrils whispered against my hair and pricked my forehead. “Most of the water’s people wouldn’t have—they think being a Yithian ‘captive’ a great honor. You’re more ambivalent.”
I pulled back. “You were saying. About magic and boundaries.”
“You illustrate the problem yourself. You flinch when I understand you too well—but I’ve been reading humans since long before you were born. You want to believe some boundaries too essential to blur. You choose to make the differences between us a barrier.”
“You think humanity can’t avoid another war … because you make some of us uncomfortable?”
“It’s one example. The blurring of boundaries that magic requires can build trust or destroy it—depending on how it’s understood, and used. After your first atomic explosion, we surveyed the species. Our standard practice. We sent emissaries across the world to study wizards skilled at sharing bodies or sensations, and witnesses of great and terrible workings. We learned that humans usually practice such arts to glorify individuals, not to understand each other. They break social bonds and fan paranoia.”
“Wait.” My mind raced; I struggled to parse the core of what it had said from the larger implications. In January, investigating rumors that Russian agents had learned the secret of stealing bodies, we’d visited the last surviving witness of the last such crime I knew. We’d found him in Pickman Sanitarium, grown truly mad from his years there. And he’d mentioned earlier visitors who’d asked the same questions. “Were you the ones who asked Daniel Upton about body theft in Innsmouth?”
“The name sounds familiar. Yes, among many others.”
“That’s … a relief, after a fashion.”
“Why?”
“We knew someone had talked with him about it, but we didn’t know who, or what they wanted. We were worried that someone wanted to repeat Ephraim’s crime.”
“And thus in trying to learn more, we added to your paranoia. I’m sorry. It’s difficult to avoid, once a species starts down that path.”
Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s suggestions came perilously close to my own fears. Scant years after our latest world-shaking war, tensions were climbing again. Russia, once an ally, pushed into new territory; few other powers would countenance that for long. The mere suggestion of magical weapons in their arsenal had sparked answering American research. I still kept to myself the strongest evidence that their fears were well-founded. My people made body theft a capital crime for a reason: loyalty could too easily tear out its own throat, when every skin might hide an enemy.
I couldn’t trust the Outer One. The oldest and wisest people I knew, whom I did trust, warned me against it. But like Barlow with his foolhardy experiments, the Outer Ones would act whether I offered them direction or no.
It had said something earlier … I realized I was chewing my lip. “You mentioned ‘wizards.’ More than we knew about. You had some way to find out who was practicing those arts.” I tilted my head briefly toward Peters and Barlow. I suspected Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt could read my body language far better than I could read its. “Their paranoia runs deep, and it grows from a lack of knowledge. They see enemies everywhere if none make themselves obvious. If you have a spell, a device, that can tell for sure whether someone is truly themselves, that would be the best help you could offer. Barlow, and others like him, could know when they had nothing to fear.”
Tentacles swept one direction, then the other—was it shaking its head? “We learn who practitioners are by long observation, and by reading minds. Our life-shaping arts are strong and well-practiced, but we can no more give you telepathy than wings.”
“Oh.” The answer was disappointing, on multiple levels.
“Those ones there—” Tentacles rippled toward Barlow. “You’ve spoken before of the power they wield in fear. If they’re connected with leaders who share their fears, perhaps we can teach them better ways. I’d like to learn more—first from your testimony, and then I’ll speak with them directly.”
“What do you want to know?” I tried to balance my caution with the chance of gaining something from this strange, exhausting week.
“I want to share your perspective. The trapezohedron can not only provide understanding, but record it. What you’ve seen of these people’s fears could be invaluable. We could know them better, and others like them. Perhaps with that knowledge we could offer something that would ease their terror.”
My first instinct was desire: on the trapezohedron’s altar was a chance to see R’lyeh again. My vision had been terrifying, compelling—and blood-deep reassurance that however difficult it might be to build Innsmouth, another home waited for me, solid and sure.
But my gut yearning faded before sensible revulsion. Memory is precious and perilous. To share our journals with the Yith was a sacrament. To share my own perceptions with any lesser creature—especially with someone who might use my experiences now, for practical ends that I could not control—seemed more vulnerability than I should risk. My memories were full of secrets. Things I’d promised Spector never to share—even if the Outer Ones already knew them. Other secrets I held close for the sake of the world, or for a single friend.
And yet, the dangers Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt described were real. Humanity walked a precipice. We tried to hold them back from the edge—as well as we could on our own, at great price. Weighed against the chance of giving my species another fraction of safety, almost any cost was meaningless.
“Neko should come with me. She doesn’t practice magic herself, so she sees what we’ve done from a different perspective.” I couldn’t ask Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt about the threats Grandfather had mentioned—the suggestion of doppelgangers might infuriate them if mentioned aloud, whether rumor or truth. But I could ensure myself well-chaperoned, and by someone who wouldn’t object to the duty.
I also knew Neko wouldn’t argue with my decision. I didn’t try to catch the elders’ attention before we left the room.
* * *
The shimmer of the altar room was still disorienting, but easier this time.
“How do we do this?” asked Neko. She touched the altar gingerly. The metallic gray surface seemed an anchor in the shifting atmosphere.
“Think on what you wish to share,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. It leaned its head over the carved box. “You need not visualize everything, only invoke the set of understandings. Let me know when you are ready.”
I leaned back on the cushions and thought about Barlow and his team. An image came to me: polished shoes in the snow, as I lowered my eyes at gunpoint. Other flashes: Mary’s voice dissecting my brother’s desperate testimony, suggesting talismans for interrogation. The smell of Peters’s breath as he accused me of treason. A room etched with glowing gears. The rush of airless cold.
Mary cradling a girl’s dead body.
“I’m ready,” I said.
I braced myself, but the nausea was worse than I’d remembered. Every sense told me that something was wrong. Acid coated my tongue, ears cringed against a piercing shriek, fingers rubbed the raw edge of a pustulant wound. Then all died but vision and sound.
I sat bound in a Miskatonic administrative office. A uniformed man tied a blindfold across my face. Fear and anger surged, muted by my absence of heartbeat and breath. I attended with all my effort to the voices around me, labeling for Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s benefit the people who called me a spy, trying to explain their motivations.
Now I stood outside the library. A siren screamed. Around me, students exhaled fog into the night. By the great doors, Barlow approached the college president and head librarian. I thought about what he wanted in that building, how he’d exploit the commotion to steal books on forbidden arts.
Then Barlow, Peters, Mary—and their stolen students—arrayed around a vast diagram in a basement lit only by candles. They insisted I explain my presence. I could not move, and could not feel the cold I knew was there—cold without which this scene made no sense. I struggled for comprehension, pushed the dissonance away, and tumbled paralyzed—
To earlier terror, to guards training guns on a line of people with bulging eyes and thick necks, faces streaked by salt. One man wore a gold ring engraved with his wife’s name; they shoved gun barrels against his chest, demanded he remove it now now now—
But the desert is nothing without heat, and I fell onto a beach, snow swirling around Trumbull and Mary as they discussed how to save my life. I couldn’t feel the cold—
And then at last, wrestling with my own incomplete memories, I dove again into deep water. No city beckoned. Instead, through sight that drank in the least light and gathered heat, I saw the great vent. Hot-bright water streamed upward, a vast and deadly fountain. Life clustered: fungous cacti and lichen, poppy red. Long darting things with glowing spots along their sides, and fish thick with insulating fat. Scuttling crabs, utterly colorless, and an octopus with limbs like barren branches. Starry tentacles flowed from a conical shell.
And there were elders. Webbed hands and feet, muscled limbs, crests furled against skulls, gills flared wide. They moved like dancers. They eased their way around the strange forms, which they examined with lens and talisman. Wards glowed softly, flaring with the power needed to filter the vent’s toxic gases.
At the edge of vision something moved, too vast to take in. An eye blinked and vanished, and an elder looked up. I heard: kraken?
Then I gasped with lungs suddenly real. Neko’s floral perfume filled my mouth. She leaned against me, taking shuddering breaths, head pressed into my shoulder.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m okay. Just need a minute. I was flying, I don’t think…”
“That was unpleasant,” I said. Except for the last vision, the memory that hadn’t been mine. Had it been meant as trade? And if so, who had I traded with?
“I saw,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. It returned the trapezohedron to the finely etched box, a hint of reverence in its movements. “Your FBI agents seem fickle allies, at best.”
“It’s more accurate to call them fickle enemies. They help us only reluctantly.”
Anemone movements stilled. Wing-tips quivered. “We should go back now. Your elders are frightened by your absence.”