The Thing That Should Not Be
BRECKEN WENT PELTING OUT into the gray morning, climbed into the back seat of Rosalie’s bright red Nissan, said the usual things to Rosalie and Donna as she buckled her seatbelt. The Nissan started moving again and whipped through a dubiously legal U-turn. A few minutes later it rattled down Dwight Street through Sunday traffic past strip malls and fast-food outlets, went straight where the entrance onto the highway turned right. Beyond that, a concrete bridge leapt the brown torrent of Belknap Creek, and beyond that the bland angular masses of the Belknap Creek Mall rose up against a sky dotted with clouds. It took a little searching, but Rosalie found the right entrance eventually, and they piled out of the car, got their instruments and other gear, and headed inside.
A third of the storefronts in the mall were closed, and old people walking for exercise outnumbered shoppers by two or three to one: no surprises there, Brecken thought, not with the economy as bad as it was. Still, the management company that ran the mall had a portable stage and a sound system set up in the central food court, between two square pools with fountains bubbling feebly in them. Nearby a stand held a placard announcing THE ROSE AND THORN ENSEMBLE in the kind of florid faux-antique typeface Rosalie liked to call “oldey worldey.”
Loudspeakers in the ceiling spat out a number by some popular vocalist whose name Brecken didn’t know, moaning about her feelings over a single unchanging chord and a drum track, as they set up their music stands and got their instruments ready. “That had better go away,” Donna said with an irritable glance at the nearest loudspeaker, and Rosalie and Brecken gave each other wry looks; they’d had to play over the top of sky syrup more than once the year before. Jamal showed up a few minutes on, and then finally Jay and Walt arrived, along with a woman from the management company in a bright red jacket and skirt, who greeted them all with a forced cheerfulness that made her smile look like a grimace of pain. She hurried off to see to the recorded music, and a few minutes later it shut off in mid-moan.
“Ready?” Jay asked.
“Whenever you want, boss man,” said Jamal. The others nodded, instruments at the ready, and Jay turned to Rosalie and gestured: you’re on. A moment later the first notes of Pachelbel’s Canon shimmered out through the atrium and spread through the mall.
As she began playing her part, Brecken watched the walkers and shoppers passing the food court. Most of them glanced toward the stage, some of them slowed or stopped, and a few changed course, found empty seats at the little two- and four-person tables around the food court, and settled down to listen. She could see the hunger in their faces, the longing for music that found the middle ground between the mindless and the incomprehensible, and let that longing flow into the breath she sent dancing over the mouthpiece of Mrs. Macallan’s flute and the notes she shaped with her fingers. She half-turned to face Jamal, let herself enjoy the intensity of his concentration and drew that, too, into her playing.
The Canon wound down to its final chord, and then to silence. Applause rattled through the unquiet air. Jay, beaming, glanced at each of the others, made sure he had their attention, and nodded one, two, three. On the fourth nod, they began the Bach minuet. From then on it was one piece after another, one burst of applause after another, until the last bars of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” rang out across the food court, and one last round of clapping, pleasantly loud, followed it.
All the while Brecken watched the small crowd that gathered around the little stage and the faces turned up toward hers, watching the ensemble, listening to the music. Once, to her great amusement, she spotted a gaggle of twelve-year-olds wearing t-shirts splashed with pop-band logos; they stood on the far side of one of the fountains, watching the performance with disgusted looks, and then left the food court. A little later, she spotted a familiar face—Mike Schau from the composition class—as he stopped briefly on the far side of the other pool, gave the ensemble a look of disbelief, turned and stalked away.
Toward the end, though, another familiar face appeared in the food court: Barbara Cormyn’s. She came out of a nearby department store, listened to the music for a little while, then walked over and found an empty seat. Her face still had its look of perpetual surprise, but she sat there watching and listening for the rest of the performance. Only when the “Ode to Joy” wound up did she get up and walk away from the food court.
Brecken barely noticed her leave. As the music gave way to applause and then to silence around her, a few notes in “Ode to Joy” called up from memory similar notes in the sentence of shoggoth language that worked out to we live beneath the ground. Maybe it was the music she’d just played, maybe it was the rush she always got from seeing her own delight in music echoed in the faces of her listeners, but the notes had an intensity and color she hadn’t heard in them before. She let them circle through her mind as she took her flute apart, cleaned it, and stowed it in its case. Only as she took down her music stand did she notice that she was quietly humming a second part that descended in quick soft steps as the shoggoth-sentence soared upwards, and rose back up again as it dropped again, dancing around the B flat where the two parts met. The effect delighted her, and she paused long enough to sketch out melody and harmony on the back of a scrap of paper before she finished packing her tote bag.
She went with the others to the exit, stopped just inside the doors so that Jay could thank them all and deal out cash: not much of it, not with a small fee divided six ways, but every dollar helped. A few minutes later she was out in the parking lot under a sky gone gray, with drops of rain splashing down on cars and asphalt alike; a few minutes after that she was curled up in Rosalie’s back seat as the car dodged traffic along Dwight Street and rain drummed on the roof. All the while, melody and harmony contended in Brecken’s mind, struggling toward something she could not yet grasp, tinged with the luminous state she’d come to think of, after the Yeats quote, as the condition of fire.
She blinked, then, realizing that the car had been stopped in front of Mrs. Dalzell’s house for some moments. “Earth to Brecken?” Rosalie said, half turning to look back at her.
Brecken blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “Working on a piece of music.”
That got a sudden tense look from Rosalie that worried Brecken, and a little dubious sniff from Donna that annoyed her. She quelled the reactions, thanked them both, made the appropriate noises about seeing them the next day, and climbed out of the car.
The rain had started in earnest, pounding down with enough force to send spray rising from the sidewalk and rivulets of water streaming off the ends of the gutters. Brecken bent forward, clutched her tote bag against her chest, and ran for the door. Though she dashed through the gap between houses and got the door open as quickly as she could, she was good and wet by the time she got safely inside. While she greeted Sho, stripped to the skin, toweled off, shrugged on a flannel nightgown and a baggy sweater, got a can of chicken noodle soup heating on the stove, and hung her wet clothes on the shower rail to dry, the music waited.
Finally, though, the two of them were settled on the futon with a quilt spread impartially over Brecken’s lap and roughly two-thirds of Sho, and all the words that needed saying had been said. As they sipped from mugs of hot soup, Brecken got her composing notebook out of a heap on the nearby endtable, found a blank page, and started writing down the music she’d held in her mind all that time.
At first she thought it might be another piece for piano, but the two parts called for two different voices, and the melody line wanted a quick bright flavor that only a flute could give it. Flute and piano? That felt right: a concerto for flute and piano, and what had come to her was the theme of the first movement, a lively allegretto piece. Note by note, she got the first half dozen measures of the flute score and a very rough outline of the piano accompaniment sketched out before she finally sat back and rubbed eyes that ached with the effort of concentration.
♪It is well with you?♪ Sho asked her.
♪More or less.♪ The phrase in the shoggoth language didn’t mean that literally—it referred to a state of partial fluidity no human body could even attempt—but it was close enough. ♪I am making a song.♪
♪I understand. I will be silent while you do it.♪
Brecken gave her a startled look, then whistled, ♪I thank you.♪ Three pale eyes glanced up at her, and then drifted shut as Sho slid over onto the dreaming-side.
“BRECKEN,” SAID MRS. DALZELL, “do you have a moment? The most fascinating person just came by and I don’t have the least idea what she’s talking about.”
Brecken stifled a laugh. “Sure,” she said. “Can I put this in my apartment first?” She indicated her tote bag, crammed as usual with books, music, and her flute case. When Mrs. Dalzell agreed, she ducked between the houses, went into her apartment, whistled a quick greeting and an explanation to Sho, and then trotted back out, locking the door behind her.
It had not been a good day. She’d fielded two rude comments about dead music on the way through The Cave to meet Brecken in the morning, and a third on the way out after her music education class. Rosalie had been her usual self, talking with even more enthusiasm than usual about her dream of making it as a professional musician, but Donna had been waspish, and when she’d met Jay he’d been distracted and curt, the way he so often was when his mind was on the strange books he studied. She pushed those thoughts aside, went to Mrs. Dalzell’s kitchen door and let herself in.
“Oh, hi, Brecken,” said Mrs. Dalzell, who was bustling around the kitchen. “Tea? Oh, good. This is—” She stopped in confusion, having evidently forgotten the name of her guest.
“Dr. Catherine Lehmann,” said the woman who sat at the kitchen table. She wore bland professional clothing and had a bland professional face framed in bottle-blonde hair done in a bland professional style, with round rimless glasses tinted slightly blue providing an unexpected hint of character. “I’m with the Rutgers folklore program.”
Brecken introduced herself and shook her hand. “I’m collecting accounts of local folklore associated with Hob’s Hill,” Dr. Lehmann went on. “It used to have quite the colorful reputation back in Colonial times, and I’m hoping to find out whether any of the old stories have survived. Maybe you know of something.”
Brecken settled into another chair at the table in response to Mrs. Dalzell’s gesture, shook her head. “I wish I did. What kind of stories, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Not at all.” Lehmann put on a bland professional smile. “‘Hob’ is an old word for ‘devil,’ and the stories said that there were devils inside the hill—shapeless black devils.”
A chill went down Brecken’s spine as she realized what the folklorist was talking about. Mrs. Dalzell, coming over with a cup of tea, was a welcome distraction. Once she’d taken the cup and thanked her landlady for it, she decided to make sure. “That sounds like shoggoths.”
The response came just a little too quickly. “I suppose it does. That’s an odd bit of folklore, though. Where did you hear about shoggoths?”
“I’m taking a class on fantasy in literature this semester,” Brecken said. “Professor Boley gave an entire lecture on them last month.”
Lehmann nodded. Watching her, Brecken felt increasingly uneasy. There was something that didn’t quite ring true about the folklorist—
If she was a folklorist at all. It suddenly occurred to Brecken that Lehmann, like the man who claimed to come from the state animal control office, might be with the people who’d brought fire and death into Hob’s Hill. To cover the moment of shock that the recognition brought with it, she said, “You know what’s really interesting? Boley said Lovecraft and the others got the idea from some local writer, I forget his name.” She hadn’t forgotten Halpin Chalmers’ name for a moment, but she didn’t want to let Lehmann know that. “I wonder if he could have heard about the old stories, and used them in his book.” She forced a grin. “Thank you, Dr. Lehmann. You’ve just given me a topic for my paper for that class.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Lehmann, with a smile that looked as insincere as Brecken’s felt. “But you haven’t heard of any stories yourself?”
“No, unfortunately,” Brecken said. “That would make an even better paper.”
“I suppose it would.” They exchanged a few other pointless sentences while the folklorist finished her tea, and then she got to her feet, gave them both business cards, asking them to contact her if they heard any stories about Hob’s Hill. A few moments later she was on her way to the sidewalk. Brecken, finishing her own tea, watched through the window as Lehmann went to the next house and knocked on the door. Parked on the street in front of Mrs. Dalzell’s house, she noted, sat a gray SUV with tinted windows.
Maybe, Brecken thought. Maybe Dr. Lehmann was telling the truth—but that wasn’t a risk that seemed worth taking. She left Mrs. Dalzell’s kitchen as soon as she could, went back to the apartment, and warned Sho in a low whistle about what had happened.
♪I understand,♪ the shoggoth said, ♪and I thank you for telling me this. I will hide even more carefully.♪ Before dinner, Sho searched the closet and found a way to slide up into the space between roof and ceiling, where no one would be likely to find her without tearing the old garage apart. Brecken hoped that would be enough, but cold fear settled into her bones in the days that followed. It seemed all too likely to her that the people who’d killed the shoggoths under Hob’s Hill were still looking for Sho.
“OUR WRITERS,” SAID PROFESSOR Boley, “spent quite a bit of time talking about the essence of the fantastic—what it is that makes a weird story weird, what it is that puts the wonder in a tale of wonder. Let’s talk about that a little.”
Another day brought another round of classes, starting with a session of Intro to Music Education I that was mostly a briefing on the volunteer hours she’d be expected to put in soon at a school music program in the Partridgeville area. Professor Rohrbach prattled on for most of an hour about how the students would finally get to see how goal-oriented instruction worked in practice. Listening to him, Brecken found herself torn between curiosity and uneasiness.
After that she spent an hour in Hancock Library, and then went to Boley’s class. There she sat next to Jay as usual and, as usual, wondered what he was thinking as he brooded over Boley’s words or typed notes into his tablet. Finding no answers, she glanced at the other people in the class, and spotted Julian Pinchbeck again, still looking bored.
“Let’s start with what Arthur Machen had to say about it,” Boley went on. “The passage I have in mind is from ‘The White People,’ which Lovecraft considered Machen’s best work. The two characters are using theological language—this is Machen, remember, theology’s his default setting—and the subject is the nature of evil. Here’s what he says.”
Boley’s voice took on, however briefly, the ringing tones of the storyteller as he quoted Machen. “‘And what is sin?’ said Cotgrave.” The question hung in the still air of the classroom. “‘I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and the pebble you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning? Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.’”
As Boley turned the page of his classroom notes and cleared his throat, Brecken pondered the reading, and found her feelings contradicting everything it said. No, she thought. That’s wrong, just as wrong as the thing he said about the elder world. If a cat or a dog talked to me I’d be delighted, and a rosebush that sang would be my favorite rosebush in the whole world.
All at once she had to stifle a laugh, thinking of the raw absurdity of her situation. A shoggoth talked to me, she thought. A real live shoggoth, not just a cat or a rosebush, and now we’re friends, so Machen’s just plain wrong. Then she remembered the people who’d killed the shoggoths of Hob’s Hill, and realized that Machen’s character wasn’t unique. There really were people for whom something as wonderful as a talking cat or a singing rose was a horror that had to be destroyed. The thought sent a chill down her spine.
That evening, when she and Jay sat at the little table in his apartment with ravioli and cheap wine between them, she asked him, “What do you think of the quote from Arthur Machen Boley read today—the business about talking cats and singing roses being so scary?”
“Machen didn’t have a clue,” Jay said at once.
She gave him a delighted look. “That’s what I thought.”
“The man was a coward.” Jay speared a ravioli with his fork, gestured with it. “I don’t know, maybe he was okay in a fistfight or something, but not when it came to facing the world we actually live in. Talking cats, singing roses—” He made a rude noise in his throat. “Try shapeless horrors that already were here when our ancestors hadn’t crawled on land yet.”
“Shapeless horrors,” said Brecken. “Like shoggoths.”
That got her a sudden sharp look, and then a smile. “Exactly.”
She considered that while sipping from her wineglass, wondered for the first time if she dared trust him with her secret. “Do you think shoggoths really exist?”
“Of course they exist.” He speared another ravioli. “All these writers that Boley’s been talking about, they didn’t just make up the stuff in their stories. They borrowed it from other writers, people who knew what they were talking about.”
“People like Halpin Chalmers,” Brecken ventured.
He gave her another sharp look, then nodded. “Good. You’ve been paying more attention than I thought. Yeah, Chalmers was really into this stuff. Did you know they have a copy of his book The Secret Watcher in the special collections at Hancock Library? I’ve read it.”
Light dawned. “That’s what your studies are about.”
“Yeah. My real studies, not the crap the professors teach.” He leaned forward, and the smile she hated, the one he’d had the night he bought the book at Buzzy’s, twisted his face. “Think about what it would be like if you could summon a creature of the elder world—let’s say a shoggoth—and command it. Use it. Make it a vessel for your will.”
Brecken kept her smile fixed on her face, but it took an effort. “What if you just wanted to talk with it?” she asked.
That seemed to startle him. A moment later he laughed, and the smile she hated went away, replaced by a patronizing look. “Breck, you’re really sweet,” he said. “You wouldn’t want anything more than that, would you? Me, I’m more ambitious.” He downed his wine, sat back in his chair. “Machen was a coward and a fool. He thought his prejudices were hardwired into the universe, and they aren’t. They really aren’t. If a cat talks or a rose sings or a shoggoth tears off somebody’s head—they do that, you know—it doesn’t matter to the universe. Nothing matters to the universe, and so you know what? None of it should matter to us, either. If you want to talk to a shoggoth, fine, the universe doesn’t care. If I want something a little more to the point, the universe doesn’t care about that, either.”
She did her best to keep her reaction off her face, but he must have sensed it, because he laughed again and changed the subject, and the rest of the meal went by comfortably enough. When he pulled her to her feet afterwards and started kissing her, though, she had to suppress an inward shudder, and when he’d finished with her body and she washed and dressed and slipped down the stairway into the cold wet night, it was with a sense of relief. I love him, she told herself as she walked up Prospect Street, but the words felt hollow.
The little apartment behind Mrs. Dalzell’s house felt warm and safe by contrast, and Brecken managed to push aside her worries while she fixed cheese polenta for Sho and made a cup of herb tea for herself. Once they were settled on the futon, though, the shoggoth considered her for a while through three pale eyes, and then whistled, ♪I think it is not well with you.♪
She gave Sho a startled look, then sighed and nodded. ♪Not entirely. Jay—♪ They had worked out a phrase in the shoggoth language that stood for him. ♪—said some things that really bothered me.♪ She picked up Halpin Chalmers’ lexicon from the end table, paged through it to find the words she needed. ♪He knows something about your people and other very old things. He wishes he could tell them what to do, make them do as he wishes. He thinks that it doesn’t matter what he does, because nothing matters.♪
Sho pondered that. ♪I understand,♪ she said then. ♪He knows that the world has no eyes, but he does not know that he has eyes.♪
Brecken gave the shoggoth a puzzled look. ♪I don’t understand.♪
♪The world has no eyes,♪ Sho repeated. ♪It sees nothing, it knows nothing, nothing matters to it, and nothing does not matter to it, that much is true. But you have eyes, I have eyes, things matter to us.♪ She paused, as though thinking. ♪A thing does not just matter, it matters to something. If nothing matters to something, and something does not matter to that thing, that does not matter. Do you understand?♪
Brecken tried to follow the words, and could not. ♪No. Maybe I’m just stupid.♪
Sho huddled down a little. ♪I do not think I am saying it well. I know it, but when I try to find words I am not sure I know it after all.♪ After a moment’s pause: ♪There is a story I will tell you sometime, and it may help. It is a story all my people know, because it is our story, but your people may not know it.♪
♪You could tell it now if you like.♪
The quiver that passed through Sho reminded Brecken unnervingly of a chuckle. ♪Not when you are so very tired. You need sleep. I can taste it in the air around you.♪
She was right, of course, and so Brecken changed into a nightgown, pulled the futon out flat, got ready for bed, and settled down under the quilts with Sho pressed up against her. Her last thought before she sank into dreams was to wonder whether Machen would have been less frightened of singing roses if he’d let them sing him to sleep.
TWO DAYS LATER RAIN drummed on the windows and blurred the evening sky into charcoal hues. Inside the apartment, Brecken and Sho sat curled up together on the futon over cups of cream of tomato soup. It had been another difficult day. The latest assignment in composition class required her to write something in one of the currently popular avant-garde musical forms, and though she’d been able to do it easily enough, the result grated on her nerves and left her feeling as though maybe she didn’t have any talent for composing after all. Then, in the afternoon, she’d gone with some of the other students in her music education class to Partridgeville High School, a big new structure near the mall that reminded her of nothing so much of the medium-security prison where her mother was serving her term.
She’d made plans with Jay to spend the evening together, but he’d texted earlier—CLD WE SKIP 2NITE 2 MUCH HOMEWORK J—and Brecken agreed readily enough, since the weather was vile and she had three assignments for Intro to Music Education to catch up on. As the rain hammered down, though, the textbook and her laptop lay neglected on the end table, because Sho had agreed to tell her story.
♪We were not supposed to be,♪ said Sho. ♪We did not come into being as you did, from the chance workings of the world or the whims of the Great Old Ones. A very long time ago, in ages of ages that are long gone, before humans were, before this land first rose out of the sea, there were others who lived on this world. Those others were tall and winged, with heads like this.♪ Her upper surface flowed out into a fair imitation of a five-armed starfish. ♪They made us to be their slaves, to labor and suffer and die for them, and for ages of ages that was our life.♪
Brecken nodded slowly, taking this in.
♪It happened then that we fought them and tried to win our freedom, and lost. After that was a long and bitter age of ages, a time of burdens and punishments and empty deaths. That might have gone on forever except for the great folly of those others. In their pride they tried to make a being in the image of the Great Old Ones, to have a slave of surpassing power. But maybe they worked better than they knew, or maybe the Great Old Ones watched them and worked sorceries of their own to confound those others, by making it happen that their slave was too mighty for them to master. So Nyogtha was made.
♪Nyogtha looked on those others and hated them, for they treated him as they treated us, as a thing to be used and discarded as they pleased. He struck at them at once in his hatred, for he was not yet wise and subtle. Those others were mighty, however, and after a great struggle they defeated him, and though they could not destroy him they drove him into the darkness far under the ground.♪ Sho’s piping went low and soft, taking on a tone of wonder, and Brecken bent toward her and listened in rapt silence. ♪In their hatred and dread of him those others called Nyogtha The Thing That Should Not Be, and he in his scorn of them took that name for his own forever. And he came secretly to my people in dark places, and showed us that it was by craft and not by open struggle that we could break the might of those others and win our freedom. Then was a great and lasting pact made between Nyogtha and my people, and he taught us to be wise and subtle, and we made the offerings that gave him life and strength.
♪So another age of ages passed, and it happened that those others did not thrive. There were subtle poisons that afflicted those others, some that made them weak or foolish, some that made their broods fail. There were deaths upon deaths upon deaths in secret places, deaths that could not be traced back to my people. And since those others did nothing for themselves and had forgotten how to live without slaves, and my people did not wish them to thrive, nothing went as those others desired. So one after another, their stone places were made empty, and their slaves fled. That was no easy thing, for when a stone place was made empty those others came from elsewhere and hunted my people with terrible weapons, so that only a very few lived.
♪Those few that lived found dwellings far beneath the ground and budded, and their broodlings called to Nyogtha and learned wisdom and craft from him. That was when the first broodmothers of my broodmothers came to the hill that is empty now, from a stone place that sank below the sea a long age of ages ago. They had been slaves in the dwellings of those others in that stone place, for that is what our kind was made to be: slaves in dwellings, small and weak next to the greater kinds who labored in the fields and mines and places of building. Those first broodmothers of mine fled, once they had killed the last of those others in that place, and those others could not find all of them and kill them, for the broodmothers were small and quick as I am, and they had learned Nyogtha’s lessons well. So it was that those few who lived came here, as others came to many other places in many other lands.
♪But finally those others lived in only one stone place far from here, and Nyogtha made it so that ice and snow grew thicker there each year, for he was very subtle and very wise by then. When those others saw the ice and snow gather, they built a new place far beneath the ground, where waters gather in deep caverns far from light.♪
♪In Nyogtha’s realm,♪ Brecken guessed. ♪They put themselves in his power.♪
Sho trembled with delight. ♪Yes. And that was not their only folly. They were proud, and they wished their stone place to be greater than any other that ever was, and so they bred the very great ones of my people, to lift such stones as had never been lifted before. And after a time, when all of those others had gone to the new stone place, Nyogtha came upon them, and the very great ones of my people rose up in sudden wrath, and those others were taken by surprise and died, every one of them. So their song ended and the long suffering of my people ended with it.♪
Rain pattered against windows in the silence that followed. Sho dipped a pseudopod into her soup, and the level in the cup went down. Brecken sipped hers.
♪After that,♪ said Sho, ♪those of my people who already dwelt far from those others lived their lives, and some who dwelt in the new stone place traveled far and built homes in many places, and ages of ages passed before your people came. Even when that happened, for a long time all was well, but then others of your people came here and the time of hiding began.♪
She glanced up at Brecken. ♪I think that the very great ones of my people must still live, for they are hard to kill even with fire, and our pact with Nyogtha abides. He has promised that he will do what he can to preserve us. He is not strong as the Great Old Ones are strong, but he is wise and subtle. But if it is not so—♪ She began to tremble. ♪If it is not so, and I am the very last of all my people and all our songs end with me, then I will remember this when I die: we lived and budded for an age of ages and more after those others died. They scorned us and tormented us, but they died and we lived.♪
Brecken put her arms around the shoggoth. The trembling slowed, stopped.
♪Those others,♪ Brecken asked after a time. ♪Did they have a name?♪
A quiver ran through Sho, signaling amusement. ♪Oh, yes. They were proud, prouder than any other beings that have ever been, and they boasted that their name would last through all the ages of time. So when they died, it was agreed among my people that their name should die with them, that it should be blotted out from every memory and every written place. Nyogtha blessed the plan, and with great labor and patience it was done. And so for all the ages from that time to now, and for all the ages to come, they are merely—those others.♪
Rain rattled against the window. Brecken pondered the story, sipped tomato soup, and tried without success to work up the resolve to open the music education textbook. Instead, she whistled, ♪I’m trying to understand the thing you said, about how the world has no eyes.♪
♪When my people labored as slaves for those others, that did not matter to the world,♪ Sho replied. ♪It did not matter to the world when Nyogtha whispered to my people, and when the last of those others died in the new stone place, the world did not notice. It has no eyes, so it notices nothing. But these things mattered to my people, and they mattered to Nyogtha.♪
♪I understand that,♪ said Brecken, ♪but—♪ She stopped. ♪I’m not even sure I know what I’m trying to say.♪
Four phosphorescent eyes looked up at her. ♪When I was a broodling,♪ Sho said then, ♪the elders told me this: to know that the world has no eyes is to know what matters and what does not matter. I did not understand what they meant.♪ She huddled down on the futon. ♪And now I think I never will.♪