Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 18

"The Egyptologist was the one to finally ask what I'm sure many in the room were dying to, but were too polite or shy to give voice to themselves. 'Many people have called you a racist,' she said. 'Would you agree?'

"I picked the slightly more circ.u.mspect answer from the choices Lovecraft offered me and said, 'Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved,' which even seemed to make sense in the moment. But there was more to Lovecraft's response, and I had no choice but to continue. 'The problem of race and culture is by no means as simple as is a.s.sumed either by the n.a.z.is or by the rabble-catering equalitarian columnists of the Jew-York papers.'

"The room went silent, except for the tapping of fingers on mobile devices and some squirming in seats. The Egyptologist pressed on, asking, 'So you don't agree with the civil rights movement's achievements since your death?'

"Lovecraft's databases didn't include any history at all since his death, except some details about the technology that made him work. None of the options were good, so I chose the one that didn't mention both 'n.i.g.g.e.rs' and 'rat-faced Jews,' and went with the ignorant but superficially thoughtful-sounding, 'Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold. The black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists... But it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the negro were the white man's equal.'

"I expected Dr. Mason to say something, or maybe try and steer the conversation in another direction, but he let it ride. The Egyptologist followed up with another question, this time about Jews. Someone else followed up with a query about miscegenation, followed closely by another about the people living in New York. Every answer appalled me, but they came fast and natural. The audience knew their Lovecraft, of course, and thus they knew just what to ask about to elicit the most shocking responses. The more they failed to trip me up, the more racist things they got Lovecraft to say, the more enthusiastic they became.

"One fellow in the back, clearly trolling for controversy, asked us which were worse, blacks or Jews. I think he must have known what Lovecraft's answer would be. Certainly Lovecraft only gave me one option, which I dutifully voiced. 'With the negro the fight is wholly biological, whilst with the Jew it is mainly spiritual; but the principle is the same.'

"The film festival's organizer seized that moment to cut things off, nine minutes early according to my clock. I can't imagine he liked this kind of talk at his festival, even if it was full of horror films, but he was quite abrupt about it. He thanked Dr. Mason, who in turn thanked the audience, and everyone applauded politely. My connection was cut, and I sank back into my chair, dripping with sweat and breathing hard. I found the sudden deviation from the schedule quite ungentlemanly and wondered where simple civility had disappeared to."

"WHAT WAS DR. MASON'S REACTION TO THE EVENT?"

"He couldn't have been happier. It's hard to tell with him of course, but he seemed pleased. For him, all that mattered was that Lovecraft gave the right answers, even if the content of them was objectionable. He returned to the lab full of energy and we dug right in, implementing the next set of features and improvements."

"And what was your a.s.sessment?"

"I was thrilled too, at least at first. I'd never experienced anything like that. The words were just there for me, and they were always such well-formed and composed sentences! All I had to do was choose. I was spending all day either testing code or serving as Lovecraft's medium. It was a week before I saw online what people were saying. That was when I saw a blog post claiming Dr. Mason was a terrible racist, which was of course ridiculous. He's African-American, for G.o.d's sake!"

"Is that when you first started breaking laboratory protocol?"

"That was three weeks later. Dr. Mason was presenting at the AAAS Conference, which was in Denver that year. Not a live demonstration, but a prepared talk, a prequel to his paper being published. That paper was of course first in all our minds at the time. At least it was supposed to be.

"I'd begun to scour the Internet for reactions to our presentation. The Egyptologist, whose name is actually Lila Harper, had blogged the whole thing, and she was impressed. She saw how significant what Dr. Mason had done was-an amazing feat of technology that had brought a dead man to life, in all his great and terrible true self. Others were less pleased. Of course plenty of people with no affection for Lovecraft railed against his racism and against us for parroting it back to modern ears. Among the fans it was more divided, with some holding forth that it was bad for other Mythos and Lovecraft writers to have such a.s.sociations, while others pointed to much worse things said by much more famous authors.

"I couldn't help myself, and started partic.i.p.ating in the debate online. I used a pseudonym at first, HarveyW, but during one particularly ugly comment-thread discussion about the moral implications of taking dead men's words out of context and putting them in a ghostly impostor's mouth, someone tracked my IP address to the university and I was outed. Fortunately, Dr. Mason didn't notice or care. He was focused on the project, plus preparing the first paper for publication. I kept up my defensive actions online, fighting for the project with ever more boastful claims about its potential and meaning. I wrote tens of thousands of words of comments and blog posts, arguing that the intellectual synthesis our revenants would be capable of could revolutionize literary and historical research and give us a new understanding of departed thinkers. My opponents called me, at the best of times, a deluded dreamer. Words like 'huckster' and 'con artist' also got thrown around a lot.

"Dr. Mason just doesn't know how this kind of thing works. He didn't care what people were saying about our Mr. Lovecraft online, but the fact is, if our reputation was bad it would bleed over into everything else-funding, publication, acceptance. The racism didn't bother him because to him it was a curious historic artifact. Reviving that part of Lovecraft was, to him, a feature, not a bug. But I knew, just knew for certain, that we needed the Lovecraft fans and the online communities on our side. So I got right in there, despite Dr. Mason's directions to the contrary. I got right in there and tried to make our case.

"But I was terrible at it. I can't think off the cuff, and I have a hard time making my case in debates. I wrote on one message board that, 'You were fine with Lovecraft's racism before you heard him say it live.' I just meant that the racist thing shouldn't surprise anyone, but they thought I was saying they were all racists. And then I was all, like, 'you're missing the point,' and they thought I was calling them stupid. I just kept digging deeper and deeper. It was Lila Harper who offered me a lifeline. She wrote, 'Show us what's good instead of telling us we're wrong.'

"I had to wait until Dr. Mason was going to the AAAS conference that February to present his paper. I bailed at the last minute, claiming stomach something. Carrie and Gene both went, though, and I had the lab to myself. I made the arrangements with Lila. A live discussion, a sort of debate with all our detractors. To show them.

"Dr. Mason's latest big addition to the Lovecraft revenant was simple enough, but it made all the difference. The software already pa.r.s.ed and indexed all the Lovecraft writings we'd scanned in (which is to say, all of them). The update simply added the entire contents of every previous conversation Mr. Lovecraft had had into the mix. Lovecraft would remember and learn from the discussions he was having every day in Dr. Mason's lab. He could remember previous questions and reference them. The original point of this addition was so that the revenant could take in positive and negative feedback in order to do better a.n.a.lysis, which it did. But it also became a more natural talker, and maybe (I hoped) the world's best debater. Lovecraft had perfect recall, remembering not just what he said, but what the people we talked with said as well. I'd never felt smarter.

"Of course the first question I got was about race. The very unambiguous, 'What's your problem with black people?' appeared in the chat window. I was broadcasting audio live onto Ustream from the lab, with Lila Harper moderating from her home in Eugene, Oregon. There were only about seventy people watching live, but it was all being recorded.

"Lovecraft tried to be a little circ.u.mspect this time. I'd included the negative feedback about the answers he'd given in Portland, marking them very high on the impolite scale Dr. Mason had implemented. He knew what we'd be saying wasn't going to be popular with his audience. 'Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold,' we said. 'The black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists. But it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the negro were the white man's equal.'

"'That's just ignorant,' someone with the screen name Yolie sent. 'It's an obscene thing for someone to say in the twenty-first century. Do you have any actual facts to back this scientific illiteracy of yours up?'

"Lovecraft registered the anger and displeasure in Yolie's question, but he wouldn't back down. He only gave me one option, which I dutifully voiced. 'The fact is, that an Asiatic stock broken and dragged through the dirt for untold centuries cannot possibly meet a Nordic race on an emotional parity. On our side there is a shuddering physical repugnance to most Semitic types, and when we try to be tolerant we are merely blind or hypocritical. Two elements so discordant can never build one society-no feeling of real linkage can exist where so vast a disparity of ancestral memories is concerned-so that wherever the Wandering Jew wanders, he will have to content himself with his own society 'til he disappears or is killed off in some sudden outburst of physical loathing on our part.'

"'But that's just not the world we live in,' protested another online ident.i.ty, this one named CCurtis. 'Only the most ignorant and backwards a.s.sholes hold such repugnant views about Jews or Asians. You yourself married a Jewish woman. Wouldn't that indicate you yourself didn't feel this physical loathing you're babbling about?'

"Lovecraft gave me three options, two of which ramped up the anti-Semitism. Instead we said something to give voice to our growing frustration at being so constantly insulted. 'Sir, I refuse to fall into your adroit trap! I simply say-with a delicate wave of a perfectly manicured and correctly gloved hand-that you are wrong and I am right. Why? Because I say so! And that is all a gentleman can add to the matter!'

"This was met with a chorus of disdain from the chat room, although there were a few LOLs scattered in there. Miss Harper chimed in with her own follow-up question. 'So you would see a world without Jews? That's a terrible sentiment in a world that's seen the Holocaust.'

"I knew this was coming, of course, but Lovecraft didn't know about World War II. I probably should have filled him in before we started. But he had learned better than to agree with the arguer's premises. I had two options, both of them thankfully lacking in overt racism. The first one stated that it was easy to be a Lycurgus on paper, but I had no idea who Lycurgus was, so I didn't want to risk it. We said, 'If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.'

"'Have you read any books on race recently?' GregLavyn wrote. 'The pseudo-science you're basing your prejudices on has been destroyed by the best scientists and philosophers of Europe. No gentleman or scholar could fairly comment on the subject without first reading thoroughly upon the subject.'

"Now that was a question! GregLavyn, bless him, knew how to strike at our weak points, playing to Lovecraft's Euro-fetis.h.i.+sm. Lovecraft started to beat a rhetorical retreat. 'I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.'

"'Well then,' wrote Greg, 'Perhaps you'd best withhold judgment until you know the true facts of the matter.'

"'I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a d.a.m.n unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about,' we said. The audience took this for the retreat it was, encouraging us to follow our own advice. I really hoped that we would. At least now he was starting to tell them what they wanted to hear, although I wasn't sure if he believed it or not.

"'So,' asked Miss Harper, 'you will spend some time making a thorough and academic study of race before you speak on it again? What if you don't like what you find? Are you capable of changing your mind?'

"'To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth,' we said, adding, 'By this time I see pretty well what I'm driving at and how I'm doing it-that I'm a rather one-sided person whose only really burning interests are the past and the unknown or the strange, and whose aestheticism in general is more negative than positive-i.e., a hatred of ugliness rather than an active love of beauty.'

"'Nice of you to admit you could be wrong,' wrote someone named LazrFcs.

"'Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots,' we said. 'Ineffective and injudicious I may be, but I trust I may never be inartistic or ill-bred in my course of conduct.'

"I was breathing with heavy relief that we'd maybe managed to weather the racism storm for the moment, when Lovecraft did something new. He drove the conversation forward on his own, not responding to any specific question but rather to the general tenor of the chat room. 'It is the frank and cynical recognition of the inevitable limitations of people in general which makes me absolutely indifferent instead of actively hostile toward mankind. Of course, so far as personal taste goes, I'm no lover of humanity. To me cats are in every way more graceful and worthy of respect-but I don't try to raise my personal bias to the spurious dignity of a dogmatic generality.'

"I think he must have been thinking about the warm reception his cat comments got in the lab before, and it worked a little of its magic this time as well. The chat was starting to warm to us, for the first time since I'd started coming online to defend him. Someone actually asked a question about our writing for once. 'In your current state, do you still think of yourself as a writer?' asked Yolie.

"Lovecraft responded with a few lines of poetry, ones where he'd changed the p.r.o.nouns around to fit the situation (a technique Dr. Mason was especially proud of). 'As, gazing on each comic act / You stare at my perfection, / I find it hard to face the fact / That I'm a mere projection.'

"It was an enigmatic reply from a being who is pure enigma, and Miss Harper had to ask for a clarification. Would Lovecraft write again? We responded, to my surprise and delight, that 'I may try my hand at something of the sort-for it really is closer to my serious psychology than anything else on or off the earth. I shall doubtless perpetrate a great deal more childish hok.u.m (gratifying to me only through personal a.s.sociation with the past), yet the time may come when I shall at least try something approximately serious.'

"A whole new firestorm of comments erupted in the chat window. People were thrilled or appalled in roughly equal numbers. How could we write new Lovecraft stories? We weren't even real or alive! Lovecraft had an answer to that. 'To all intents and purposes I am more naturally isolated from mankind than Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, who dwelt alone in the midst of crowds, and whom Salem knew only after he died. Therefore, it may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me except as components of the general landscape and scenery. My own att.i.tude in writing is always that of the hoax weaver. One part of my mind tries to concoct something realistic and coherent enough to fool the rest of my mind.'

"Wouldn't we be corrupting Lovecraft's own legacy? Muddying the waters with pseudo-Lovecraft texts? 'Everything in the world outside primitive needs is the chance result of inessential causes and random a.s.sociations, and there's no real or solid criterion by which one can condemn any particular manifestation of human restlessness.'

"The sheer audacity of it seemed to cow some large part of the audience. When someone pointed out that Lovecraft was just a computer program, that he couldn't really create or think, someone else shot back that it sure seemed like he could do both, judging from this chat. The debate rolled back and forth, while we sat back and watched for a while, smiling and happy at our achievement. We were being taken seriously. We were being given the respect of heartfelt disagreement and support.

"An hour pa.s.sed and Lovecraft continued to hold our own, impressing and provoking the audience. Finally Miss Harper called time and offered us the last word. Lovecraft only gave me one choice to sum up his feelings on the discussion. 'Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.' We were in complete agreement."

"AND YOU DID THIS SEVENTEEN MORE TIMES?"

"I did it eleven more times."

"It was, in fact, seventeen. But you don't remember after eleven?"

"I don't remember."

"Did you make any other copies of your logs besides the ones on your laptop?"

"I don't remember."

"When did you stop answering to the name Jannowitz?"

"I don't think that's correct."

"It is correct. You would only answer to Howard."

"I don't remember that."

"Why would you decide never to come out of the Lovecraft revenant?"

"Is that a hypothetical question? I'm not good at those."

"We know you're not, but it's important that you try. Think of it as an experiment."

"I think experimentation and research are vital to our advancement as a race."

"So you've often written. Can you think of a reason you'd choose to never come out of the Lovecraft revenant?"

"If someone were unhappy with their life in some way maybe. Or perhaps if they couldn't handle the responsibility of making their own decisions. Perhaps if one were forced."

"But what about you specifically, Jannowitz? Why would you never leave?"

"Let me think about that for a minute."

"Take your time."

"I'm not sure this is right. It's just a guess."

"That's fine."

"I will never know fame. I won't ever terrify or impress millions. Lovecraft was cut down in his prime. Maybe he deserves the time more than I do. Maybe he'll do more with it."

"But the revenant isn't Lovecraft."

"No. Maybe it's better."

"What is the last thing you remember? Before this interview."

"I typed up notes on my last debate session. Six simultaneous interviews and chats. I wrote that, 'The most wonderful thing in the world, I think, is the ability of my mind to correlate all its contents.'"

"That's a Lovecraft quote, isn't it?"

"I wrote it."

"That's enough, Gene. I think we've reached the end of what we could recover of his personality. Go ahead and log off."

"Jesus," said Gene, rubbing his eyes and blinking as he powered down the Jannowitz revenant. "I can see how you could lose yourself in it. There's no time to think for yourself."

"And you're sure you've pulled in everything Jannowitz ever wrote?"

"Carrie and I put everything he wrote into the databases, Dr. Mason. Online and off, I'm positive."

Dr. Mason sighed. "There's just not enough to make a full revenant model for Jannowitz. I don't think we can restore him this way."

"His neurosurgeon has requested access to the Lovecraft revenant for treatment purposes again. He's sent us four e-mails today."

"I suppose we'll have to let him," Dr. Mason said. "I was hoping to find something today we could use to bring him back. But his physicians think neuronal cauterization is the only way. They want to burn the Lovecraft persona out of his brain."

"And that will work?"

"I can't imagine, but what else is there? In any event, it's not our concern. We've wasted a day on this. Take half an hour for lunch while I load in Mr. Lovecraft, then we'll begin this afternoon's creative exercises."

"I think the new story it's writing is coming along pretty well."

"It's not to my taste, of course, but yes, I think you're right. I doubt the man himself would know the difference once we're finished."

The Skinless Face DONALD TYSON.

Donald Tyson is a Canadian writer of fiction and nonfiction dealing with all aspects of the Western esoteric tradition. He is the author of Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (2004), Grimoire of the Necronomicon (2008), The Necronomicon Tarot (2007), and The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon (2010), as well as a biography of Lovecraft t.i.tled The Dreamworld of H. P. Lovecraft (2010) and the novel Alhazred (2006), all of which were published by Llewellyn Publications.

THE SIDE WINDOW OF THE UAZ-452 WAS SO COATED WITH dust, Howard Amundson could barely distinguish the brick-colored desert from the cloudless blue sky above its flat horizon. Not that there was much of interest to look at from the jolting, grinding minibus, he admitted to himself. Over the past ten hours the scenery had transitioned from the gra.s.sy plain that lay just outside of Mandalgovi to red dirt with only the occasional trace of green to show that anything was alive in the desolation.

There was no question in Amundson's mind that the Gobi Desert was the most desolate place he had ever seen. The sheer bleakness of it held its own strange grandeur. It was nothing like the deserts in Hollywood movies, with their rolling sand dunes. The Gobi was carpeted with rocks. They lay scattered everywhere, ranging in size from pebbles to Volkswagens. For the most part the empty landscape was flat, but here and there a low ridge broke the monotony.

A jolt beneath his seat clicked his teeth together on the corner of his tongue. He tasted blood and cursed. The ruts in the track the driver followed were so deep, they bottomed out even the Russian UAZ in spite of its spectacular ground clearance.

The Mongolian in the front pa.s.senger seat turned and grinned, then spoke a few words to the driver, who glanced back at Amundson and laughed. Neither of them understood English, so there was no point in talking to them. They had been hired to transport him to Kel-tepu, and obviously were not concerned about what condition he might be in when he arrived.

He wrinkled his nose. The inside of the minibus smelled like a mixture of oil, sweat, and camel p.i.s.s. G.o.d alone knows what it had transported before Baby Huey. Amundson twisted in his seat to study the straps that held the canary-yellow case of the multi-spectrum electromagnetic imager on its palette. The machine was the only reason he was in this desert. When Alan Hendricks, acting dean of the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, had offered him the chance to give it a field test, he had jumped at the opportunity. A successful trial would clinch the grant of tenure he had been lobbying for over the past two years.

Only later had he paused to consider what would be involved in moving Baby Huey halfway around the world to the backside of nowhere. The machine was as small and as light as modern electronics could make it, but even so, it took a lot of energy output to make electromagnetic waves penetrate solid rock, and Huey tipped the scale at more than a quarter of a ton. Beside it sat the generator he had demanded from the Mongolian authorities. He had made it clear to them that there was no way he would take Huey into the desert without its own power supply. The government had agreed to his demand. The Mongolians wanted the test to be a success almost as much as Amundson.

I should be back at MIT going over term papers, he thought, scowling through the dirty window. If this thing runs into some glitch and fails, I'm going to look like a fool, and there won't be anyone else to blame. I'm naked out here-no a.s.sistant, no colleagues, no one to cover my a.s.s.

It was not a comforting thought. He had been quick to claim credit for the basic design work on Huey, even though the initial concept had come from one of his graduate students, a bright Chinese named Yun. The grad student had kept his mouth shut-he wanted his doctorate and knew better than to try to upset the natural order of things at the university. But that only meant that if Huey failed, Amundson would have to shoulder all the blame.