As the airship descended to the planet’s surface, I felt the dizzying effect of the continuum threshold fading. Outside the windows, the sky faded into dense clouds. I felt a heaviness in the pit of my stomach, as if I’d just run a marathon with a backpack full of rocks.
Our descent paralleled the sinking feeling I was getting as the clouds rolled past. Using the Raumspalter to spirit the Magnus-thing from the BC coast back to its home planet – and then activating it again to sling us immediately back to good old Hamilton on good old Earth – had seemed like a good idea at the time.
But technology can always go wrong – one missed keystroke and the whole program crashes. My heart sank as Sorcerer neared the surface. I saw a broad plain stretching into the distance, a landscape interlaced with metal pipes connecting factories and storage tanks, serviced by wide roadways dotted (it seemed from this high up) with huge low-slung trucks and trailers.
What? Had we blown it? Was my brave and daring interstellar flight an interstellar flop? Below me, wasn’t this the built-up industrial flats of Hamilton’s North End?
“The Magnus-thing’s still on board,” I observed, “but at least we’re home.”
From someplace on the bridge, Tobias had produced an antique walkie-talkie the size of a shoebox and established contact with someone whose laboured English, compressed and fuzzy through the buzzing speaker, I could barely understand. Leslie Chung-James, still in her wetsuit, was taking pictures through the front windshield.
Agnes was the only one who looked like she was doing any actual work, checking altitude, wind speed, gasbag pressure and so forth on the dashboard gauges, guiding the airship through its descent and casting anxious glances at Tobias, clearly wishing he would involve himself in this crucial phase of our journey.
“Madre dios, Tobias. Help me navigate,” I heard her say. “We can’t rescue Max if we can’t get there.”
In short, everyone ignored me. They were busy with other things, and, as I soon realized, I was dead wrong about where we’d ended up.
As we descended, I looked more closely at the surface of the world below us. I noticed that although the network of pipes was arranged in familiar patterns – round, uniform in diameter and side by side like cigarettes in a pack – there was something weird about the buildings they connected and the ways they connected them. Pipes would curve out of one building and into the next identically, as if they were mirror images. And the buildings weren’t the familiar rectangular boxes, painted in dulls greens and greys. Instead, these buildings showed unexpected combinations of curves, angles, blind corners, planes that did not look straight or level but that nevertheless bonded together to support enormous weight – as if the whole industrial landscape had been designed in some other dimension.
Or on some other planet, by minds and eyes and tools utterly alien to anything human. Now a few thousand metres or so up, I could see to a far horizon. I couldn’t tell if I was looking north, south, east or west, but this wasn’t the North End. Rocked by a gust of wind, the motion of the cabin gave me glimpses of a grand (but depressingly lifeless) vista. Off to our right it extended for miles, came to a mountain range and just kept going up the mountainside, like metal scales on the body of an enormous robot dinosaur.
A dinosaur long extinct. Wasn’t anything alive here? Every square metre looked built up, paved over; every splinter of wood or drop of oil burned sometime past and now nature had its revenge. Now that we were lower, I could see that the roadways were cracked and potholed; the huge vehicles on them silent, collapsed, slumping off into the weeds. There was life here: wherever a roof had leaked, or pavement cracked, alien greenery had erupted. Vines snaked from broken roadways; canopies of branches stretched above ruptured rooftops. Here and there a chimney still smoked: someone or something was still in business, but I was looking at all this and thinking, They call Hamilton a post-industrial city, but look at this – a post-industrial planet.
“We’re not home at all,” I said.
Tobias looked up from the radio. “Nate, our plan worked. Welcome to R’lyhnygoth.”
“What a dump.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t be here long.”
“The plan is to land, dump Magnus, head home, right?”
“Exactly. Land, dump Magnus, pick up Max, Bob’s your uncle.”
This sounded suspicious to me, aside from the fact that I didn’t have an uncle named Bob (though, since just a few days before I’d met a grandfather I had no idea existed, clearly anything was possible). I already knew that Tobias’s partner, Max, had been left behind on R’lyhnygoth and that Tobias was determined to find him, but my own worries had, to say the least, dampened my compassion.
“I thought Max was a writeoff?”
“You little fart. Don’t even think that.”
“You told me we’d be in and out faster than a Timmies drive-through.”
“Nate, I need your help on this. Everything’s set up. I’ve located Max. We can rescue him, fire up the Raumspalter and go home. It’s just that –”
“Tobias, I want to do the right thing, but –” In fact, Meghan had told me, “Get your ass back here,” and I’d promised her I would. In a burst of genius, I’d decided that if we started the Raumspalter, we could ride the continuum threshold to R’lyhnygoth, get rid of the hideous creature in LOAD/EVAC, open another threshold and be back in Hamilton in a matter of hours. What could go wrong?
“Max has got himself into kind of a situation,” Tobias confessed.
“We don’t have time for a situation. If he’s so smart, how did he get himself in a ‘situation’?”
“Stop being an asshole.”
Tobias mustered a group of us down to the room across from LOAD/EVAC. Except for me, it was a kind of all-genius team, from backgrounds too complex and varied to describe: Margrit, a Black American musician who had become one of the airship’s navigators; Tobias, a Haida First Nations aspiring painter who had been a successful movie actor in Berlin (“playing Indians in German westerns”) in the 1930s and was Sorcerer’s acting captain, at least until Max came back; and Leslie Chung-James, who I understood was kind of a rock star in the world of marine archaeology – which I have to admit, until I met her, I didn’t even know was a thing.
“Take this.”
I was handed a section of galvanized pipe about four metres long, its tip wrapped in a bundle of parachute silk. Tobias, Leslie and Margrit each had one too – as if we had crossed the galaxy to tote banners in a Santa Claus parade.
Instead of landing quickly, it had now been almost an hour that Sorcerer had been drifting, with what I thought extreme slowness, past forested plateaus into a mist-filled valley. For every minute spent on R’lyhnygoth, forty minutes passed on Earth, so clearly my plan of exiting the west coast in the morning, ricocheting off the end of the continuum threshold and getting back to Hamilton in time for supper was already trashed.
The ship shuddered as Agnes, at the controls, changed direction. The mist became walls of dark fog. An expanse of factories, cooling sheds, storage tanks, access roads and pipelines came into focus: we were descending into a city. Huge steeples, corners and cornices thrust up out of the gloom, skyscrapers tall as the Rockies, buildings so huge that Sorcerer, almost two hundred metres long, seemed to have shrunk to Matchbox toy–size.
We were descending not into the endless city but past it, past the expanses of glass, metal and electrical wiring into older architectures of poured concrete and carved stone. An enormous canyon.
So far, all I had seen of R’lyhnygoth were expanses of industrial megalopolis. But this part of the seemingly unending city looked ancient, and deserted. Its weird architecture – balconies opening into voids, entrances and exits in strange places, doorways through which I could look downwards, yet glimpse the stars – didn’t disguise the cracks, broken cornices or flutters of furtive movement in the black mouths of its broken windows.
Through the boiling fog, the airship approached a stone steeple so high that instead of going over it, Sorcerer navigated around it. I looked up to see its top disappear in the mist. The steeple was an important landmark; just past it, we came to a dead stop, propellers spinning and reversing, the great engines and their gimbals buzzing and clattering to keep us in position as we dropped through the fog like a shipwreck sinking to the sea bottom. Eventually we slowed to land, light as dryer fluff, on a plaza littered with rock fragments and stagnant puddles of green, slimy-looking water.
We were on the deep bottom of this fog-ocean. Across this unwelcoming landscape I could see, in the dim light, three huge stone steps, each a couple of metres high, leading to a gaping entrance into full darkness.
“In order to save the rest of us, Max and his friends holed up in the crèche. That’s where, once removed from its host, the latest incarnation of Yog-Sothoth was raised to maturity. When it was still in the cradle, your friend H.P. Lovecraft, after he recovered from surgery, snuck in there and tried to kill it. But at the last moment he lost his nerve, so all he did was set off a series of disasters.”
“I think any kind of violence,” I observed, “can turn around and bite you.”
Tobias shook his head. “You don’t know the half of it. To kill the infant Yog-Sothoth, Howard rummaged around the airship and found a Nazi dagger. He took it to the crèche, but lost his nerve when the creature recognized him. He dropped the dagger and ran.
“Back on the R102 – this is before we gave it a name – all hell broke loose. A lot of the crew already had bad feelings about taking on the vulsetchi as a power source. I don’t blame them, but at the time it was the only way to power up enough to get us back to Earth. True, the vulsetchi are a strictly meat-eating fungus, but it doesn’t take much to keep them going. We thought that once back on Earth, we’d refuel Sorcerer from butcher shops.”
“And the occasional crew member.”
Tobias shrugged. “Only if they’d died from natural causes.”
“Gross.”
“Gustav Kaindl was a Dachau camp officer who’d got on board during the escape and claimed he’d changed sides. But not everyone was buying that – remember, aside from Eadric and a few other original members, the crew were fresh out of Dachau and hated Kaindl’s guts.
“The thing is, it was Kaindl’s dagger that Howard made off with. And when Kaindl couldn’t find it, he … well you could say overreacted. He made a stink with the crew. Max and I were off meeting with the hihyaghi, and when Kaindl started roughing up crew members, they fought back. In fact, they formed a lynch mob.”
“A lynch mob? They hanged him?”
“Much worse than that. Hanging at least kills you dead. Nate, you know what happened to Kaindl. You saw him – you had a visitation during the crossing.”
“My god.” What Tobias was saying sank in. “They threw him into the vulsetchi hold?”
“And the vulsetchi absorb living things. They don’t always kill them right away. Sometimes they merge nervous systems, so that victim and vulsetchi become one, lingering and in pain, for years.”
“Yuck. What’s this got to do with Max?”
Tobias’s walkie-talkie clicked and hissed and a man’s voice, heavy with static, crackled out of the tiny speaker. Tobias lifted it to his mouth. “Ja, Max,” he said. “Kommen.” He unslung the walkie-talkie, hung it on a wall hook and pointed to the window.
“That’s where we’ve got to go now – a shrine of the Great Old Ones. The crèche, where Howard tried and failed to kill the creature that grew into Yog-Sothoth, the creature that’s now on its way to Earth. The crèche is where we’ve got to go now.”
What with the whole Kaindl-vulsetchi story, I was feeling disgusted that I was even on board Sorcerer.
“We’ve got to go to some kind of shrine to Yog-Sothoth? Won’t it be guarded? Why can’t we just –”
“Nate, shut up.” Tobias looked grimmer than I had ever seen him. “If you want to get home fast – if you want to get home, ever – I need you to help me. We’re going to the crèche, going there now. Because that’s where Max is, and we’re not going back to Earth until we rescue Max.”