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Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.
Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.
You can lose yourself in certain types of spaces, at a certain time. I discover this every day as I pass further into the East. In becoming a shadow, in needing to hide, to avoid, to make myself invisible, I have begun to experience the strange sensation of no longer existing, of floating, even though most days I am an enormous komodo dragon.
The paths here are easier to discern, the map in my head comfortingly similar to what lies ahead of me. And yet there’s no accounting on that map for human traffic. On this alt-Earth, the border with China is more secure and the Nazi threat worse, so that in the East the Soviet presence is slightly more relaxed, slightly lessened. Because of this, there is more chaos to navigate: long lines of refugees, wary of any stranger, trying to find their way home in this space, this corridor, between types of authority. You can see it on their faces, the dearly held memory of where they came from before their relocation, some of the children barely old enough to remember the places moved to, but trudging along beside or staring from wagons pulled by oxen. They are marching into a situation less certain than where they came from, but, then, so am I.
The Remnant voice in my head has become as insistent and inescapable as a tooth-ache, and like a tooth-ache I find I can ignore it the busier I am, the more attuned to my environment. I still feel the pain but I am able to distance it.
Thrice I have been attacked, once by brigands and twice by deserters from Trotsky’s armies. I don’t know what they thought they were attacking, if they saw me as food or simply so strange that they had only one choice, and that was to attack. But each time, I discovered at the end I was alone in the middle of a circle of blood and gore….and realized that although I can stop the Remnant from pushing me to commit an act I have not already envisioned, that when I do engage in violence, its influence takes me to a level of bloodthirstiness that can be rationalized as self-defense but only just. And just, too, the suggestion that perhaps if I cannot rid myself of the Remnant, then I will take it out on my pursuers.
You have more potential than this, the Remnant told me after one such event, as I came out of my blitzkrieg of a rage. You could lead men. You could become a despot and then something more than a despot. You could cultivate charisma. You could be a stronger man than even Trotsky.
I almost laughed at the miscalculation from this Remnant, and this sign of his misunderstanding made me more optimistic about one day being free of such influence. What does a mountain care about becoming a despot? Why would a komodo, agent of chaos, stand still long enough to form a government? Still, it put the seed in my head, an inkling of one path once I reached my destination, confirmed the signs that meant one day a portal would exist there.
Then, too, the sudden reappearance of angels put the Remnant in perspective. I saw them only from afar, and only when I became invisible to evade human beings. It was as if they could not see me visible, but something in my emanations invisible gave off an indicator. Angels solemn on a hilltop, heads tilted toward the sky, channelling…something. Angels sitting in small, sullen pubs in backwater towns so shoddy and withdrawn that life there had gone on undisturbed by all of the turmoil beyond. Angels posing as the dispossessed, trudging along in mimicry of human distress. The ones who walked among human beings were subdued and almost faded, as if in trying to fit in they had inadvertently dimmed themselves so much that now they had become part of the background, of the setting. A smudge on a window. A reflection in a puddle. But the ones in wilderness—they flourished in a kind of glow that sucked light to them. Seeing one above me as I waited silent in underbrush, I felt a kind of pull, as if the angel were a kind of demonic lighthouse, drawing me to it. Only the gnawing of the Remnant at the edges of my mind kept me from giving in to that influence. Although the thought has come to me that perhaps they’re looking only for the Remnant, that without the Remnant I would be free of the angels too.
We are close now. The landscape has become both more and less barren and in the distance between the trees I see a kind of wall of dark green that means we are about to enter deep forests.
Yesterday, I came to my senses facing a trail of blood through the snow and the Remnant giggling in my ear. I think he meant me to follow the blood, but instead I went the other way.
Dear Pavlov: I have met up with some of your comrades, although I do not think they were your friends. Although we had some disagreements, it worked out all right in the end. I know you said you have relatives out this way. It makes me wonder if you have visited out this far. If so, you understand the way the landscape eats the roads and how the beauty of it comes with a certain watchfulness…I’ve certainly seen my share of sentinels. I think of you sometimes, defending your position, and wonder if this place is what you dream of as the opposite of where you are, a place you would rather be. Whereas I now think back to the winter city with a kind of perverse fondness. There is something to be said for having a purpose, even a narrow one, and when that is taken away, when your goal is thousands of miles and years from where you are, it feels like drifting. It feels like the middle of something you can’t see the shape of yet. – Your Friend, K
Award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer's final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, Finch, has just been published in the the UK from Atlantic's Corvus imprint. His writer guide Booklife and associated Booklifenow website focus on sustainable creativity. Forthcoming books include The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and The Steampunk Bible. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, and several year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The New York Times Book Review, the B&N Review, and many others. If you like the blog, please consider