Nnnnnn-gt-vvv of the Outer Ones—May 1949:
There is a world—a planetoid, chosen for ease of camouflage among thousands like it—where wind whispers through air cold as the vacuum. The nearest star is a distant candle. Radar, radiation, subtle folds of gravity: these are the best ways to perceive the cities tucked into crevasses, the spiderweb bridges spanning jags of icy mountain.
The bridges, aeons old, were here when we arrived. They offered omen and reminder: Life persists everywhere. Life vanishes everywhere. Find it and listen, or it will pass unknown. I spread my wings, furl my claws, and spring from Yuggoth into the void behind and between worlds.
Here is neither cold nor heat, only form. Shimmers of color, more perfect than any permitted by surface physics, mark direction; bubbling shapes carry messages left by travelers past and yet to come. From deeper still drifts a faint fluting. The pounding, pulsating trill wavers on the edge of understanding. Pay too close attention, and the friction will wear your mind smooth.
Conversation between winged and wingless is our best distraction from that distant melody. Embodied travel-mates fly beside me. The disembodied, in their canisters, come encircled in our clasped limbs. Amid reality’s foundations, we speak with equal ease of the deepest philosophy and the most immediate gossip.
We break through the dimensional membrane on the edge of atmosphere. Through heat and wind I plummet, extending just enough of myself to enjoy the physicality of speed, before landing lightly on a granite cliff shadowed by pines. Here, on a hill that humans avoid as much from habit as from half-remembered fear, I feel the mining colony shifting beneath me. Travel-mates and cross-mates and offspring and research clusters, the ever-changing rivalries and friendships and political debates through which we adapt to this place as to a trillion others.
Soon there will be a shorter journey to our new-delved mine, in a city richer and denser than any human habitation we’ve dared before. Soon there will be new recruits who can help us understand what’s happening on this world we’ve adopted, and unwelcome insight into what we must do about it. But for now, I am in Vermont, and I am home.