Shadows Out of Time

“Who else am I gonna sound like?” Pmurt knew the answer to that, even if the subordinate male didn’t. He added, “Make sure I’ve got some more reservoir water for the ceremony. I want to drink it where they can see me pour it down.”

“Really? Um, really, sir?” The aide remembered, more slowly than he should have, that the man in whose body Pmurt dwelt deserved — more, demanded — his respect. But, respectfully, he persisted: “Sir, the locals are so up in arms about this, I really don’t think it’s a good idea. If anything happens to you, they’ll blame the water, and the publicity will be terrible. Worse than terrible, whatever that is.”

Worse than terrible is wearing this horrible body the way the body wears its clothes. But Pmurt could not tell the aide any of that. Instead, he said, “Everything is gonna be fine. The big brains say the water’s safe, that’s plenty good for me.”

He made his speech that afternoon. The bushes and trees in the distance looked odd to him; they were as different from the plants he was used to as this body was from the one that still lived in those ancient times. The order-keepers— police, that was the term — made sure the protesters stayed far enough away that their shouts and chants were barely audible.

“This is gonna be a great hotel!” he said, waving back at it. His human name surmounted the building in enormous golden letters of anodized aluminum. “It’s beautiful. The scenery is gorgeous. So is the reservoir, with all this fresh, clean water to enjoy.” He drank another glass of water from the artificial lake. It tasted like…water. What else would it taste like? Setting down the tumbler, he continued, “Important people will come and visit here. There’ll be good jobs for people from Arkham. Everything will be terrific. And those ingrates over there”—he pointed toward the far-off protesters—“they can go take a hike. You hear me? They can take a hike and never come back.”

The assembled dignitaries clapped their hands — a sign of approval among humans, as Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had noted. The males wore outfits similar to his own. The females had on clothes of the same order as those worn by the one who belonged to him, though theirs showed greater variety than the males’. His woman was among the most attractive, which he took to be a sign of the high status of the human in whose body he was exiled.

Some of the humans drank ethanol mixtures at the reception after his speech. He refrained, not wanting to poison himself even slightly. One of the men laughed and said, “Still on the wagon, are you? A little never hurt anybody.”

“You live your life. I’ll live mine,” Pmurt said. For some reason, the male seemed to find that funny.

After the reception, he and his woman (the proper term, he remembered, was wife) ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. The meal satisfied the animal senses of his human body, so he supposed it was good. A stream of humans kept interrupting his feeding by congratulating him. Among the Great Race, that would have been worse than rude, but the woman took it in stride, so he tried his best to do the same.

The went up to a room once they finished eating. He glanced through all the publications he found there. One praised him and his business acumen. Others described the scenic and cultural possibilities in the region around Arkham. He learned a good deal.

“You don’t usually read so much,” his wife remarked.

“Something to pass the time,” he said, as neutral a reply as he could find. She shrugged and turned on the television. He fell asleep while she was still watching it. He fell asleep, and the water from the reservoir, the water that diluted but did not obliterate the alien, extraterrestrial matter that had made a blasted heath of Nahum Gardner’s farm, swirled through his bloodstream and rose to his head, stranger and stronger than any merely earthly wine ever fermented. Had he been a merely human personality, it might not have hit him so hard, but he was what he was.

He dreamt…He dreamt of colours out of space, colours unimagined by either humans or the Great Race (and perhaps that foreign spelling of the word emphasized how alien, how unimaginable, those colours were). His dreams threatened to explode his mind, not from horror but from sheer grandiosity. No one, he was sure, had ever had dreams like his before. Of course, he knew nothing of Nahum Gardner and the eerie fate that had befallen him, his family, his livestock, and his crops. He knew nothing, and he’d fought shy of finding out.

When he woke, that sense of grandiose magnificence still filled him to overflowing. He didn’t remember just what he’d dreamt, only that it was important and he was important. He was so important, he shook his wife till her eyes opened.

“What is is?” she mumbled sleepily.