“All right, Kell – I understand your people have their secrets. But you need to tell me everything you know about Leviathans. Right now.”
Brooks stared at the being, who looked back at him with an apathy that would have enraged a lesser man. But Brooks kept his composure.
He had called the Shoggoth into the Captain’s Study, and the being had taken his time in coming – four minutes, when it was less than a minute’s walk.
“You say that as if you believe I am hiding information from you,” Kell replied to him evenly.
“Aren’t you?” Brooks retorted.
“Yes,” Kell answered. “But not for the reasons you seem to think.” Shaking its head, Kell moved to sit, but despite these conspicuously human moves – that Brooks imagined were entirely intended to put him at a greater ease – there was still something unnatural in even just the way that Kell sat. It was too rigid in some ways, too lax in others.
“Right now, I don’t care about your reasons. There are 35,000 beings on the Craton – and trillions in the Sol System. You need to tell me.”
“Can you describe color to a blind man?” Kell asked.
“What?”
Kell’s head turned to the side, and the being stared at him. Unblinking. “How does one describe something another being has never experienced? I have memorized your entire language, and yet there are no words for what I see. You want me to tell you how large the Leviathan is? I see it expanding into infinity in dimensions your brain is incapable of imagining. It fills the void, it fills the stars, infinite and finite at once. Does this help you, Captain?”
Brooks sat forward. “You’ve got to know something useful, Kell.”
“A weakness in it? No, it is not that obvious. I have never seen a being like it before, but I can see more than you. I see that it has been asleep – in what you might call a nightmare – for the age of this universe. And in even marginally awakening it, you and the Hev vessel have become the focus of its . . . ire. That is a simplification; it does not feel emotions as you understand them. As I do not. What do you and a paramecium have in common to feel, after all?”
“In this case we’re the microbe,” Brooks commented.
“In how it views you – I suspect yes. It is not fully awakened, as I have said. But it is somewhat awake, and it is lashing out. It is not a stupid beast running purely on instinct. Its intelligence is of a different kind than ours, and it is vast.”
Kell stood up. “Captain, you have done the right thing by pulling it away from the path that leads to Earth. More than you can ever realize, this mattered. It will not have mercy on whatever or whomever it finds when it fully awakens. Even if it wanted to. We must not let it find a system that is inhabited by life. If it costs all of our lives aboard this ship, it is worth it.”
Without another word, Kell left.
Other Terrestrial 