On Safari in R'lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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Roberts and I hit hard, but not hard enough to hurt ourselves. We clutched each other and stayed upright, and found ourselves gasping up at a streaky, bubbling yellow sky flecked with black, unradiant stars. Not the kind of yellow sky which makes you expect a tornado. Not even the kind of yellow sky which results from a dust storm, or a forest fire. It was—and I say this advisedly—an uncanny color. A distressing color. It made me think of pus and the pulsating bodies of hungry maggots, and not in a good way.

I acknowledge there’s no good way to think about pus. There are probably good ways to think about maggots, if you’re an entomologist.

Self-consciously, I let go of my colleague. I felt terrible: achy and discombobulated, as if I had been fighting the flu.

“Right,” I said. “Well, we somehow wound up here. And we’re obviously talking about some very different physical rules.” I pointed at the pavement.

Roberts blinked at me. “Rocks?”

“Octagons,” I said. “Traditionally, they don’t interlock without small squares to make up the corners.”

“But honeycomb?”

“Hexagons,” I said. “Like the basalt pillar we were on. Your bathroom tiles, those are octagons. With the little black squares between the corners, because that’s how topology works.”

Well, that was how topology worked where we came from. Here, apparently octagons interlocked.

I hoped my amino acids didn’t decide to celebrate by becoming unraveled. I couldn’t be sure they weren’t already doing so. I felt hungover, wrung out, and like my cranium was full of kitty litter. Roberts, rocking on his feet, pressing a fist into his stomach as if to counter a sharp pain, looked even worse.

Chalk one up for Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

“What the hell did you say?” Roberts asked.

“Fer corpus meum animumque mecum nunc Carcosam,” I repeated.

“Sure.” If his tone were any more soaked in exasperation it would have been dripping. “But what does it mean?”

“Oh.” My cheeks burned from more than the—possibly mildly caustic—atmosphere. “Come with me, body and soul, to Carcosa.”

“Hmm. So this is Carcosa.” He straightened himself up and looked around. “What do we know about Carcosa?”

“There are some very weird towers in this city. If it is a city. I don’t see anybody who might live here.”

“These buildings do look like they were drawn by Dr. Seuss on cold medicine. The good stuff, with the codeine in it.”

My eye had been drawn by a flicker of movement embedded in the soupy horizon. If you’ve ever seen bats rise from under a bridge at dusk, or a murmuration of starlings taking flight, you have an idea what it looked like: varying pinpricks flocking in weird, uneasy patterns, stretching and collapsing, spiraling obscenely. It looked more computer-generated than real. I half expected to find it had been projected.

But whatever was flocking rose, and spiraled (obscenely), and rose again. I had the unsettling impression of it casting about, like a hound after a scent. The shapes coalesced into a writhing arrowhead and darted in our direction. I thought at first that they weren’t too far off— that they moved slowly, and were small.

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