AS THE SOGGUTHS sped through the universe taking the shortest route each way to reach Earth before the birth of their child, Olive became their lifeline on the domestic side as she was becoming an essential partner to her future husband Charles Millstone in matters of national security.
On the surface, Sheriff Fatty Millstone maintained his usual routine while he received daily updates about the Sogguths. He handled matters so at the Cracked Bell pub none of the newshounds—not Straight and not Crenshaw—had the slightest inkling about what was happening right under their noses.
Fatty insisted that no one talk at the pub about the travel plans of Sogguth, his trusted agent on the Universe Council. For any immediate, urgent update, the sheriff would have himself called away to the command centre or the hot tub for discussions. The news surrounding Sogguth and his family evolved rapidly, and the situation at the Council was dynamically changing.
Universe Council hardliners who had launched the attack on the ancient mining operations at the South Pole on Earth had regrouped as a cabal once their five secret agents had been apprehended and returned to them. Now Sogguth was alert to the cabal’s every move through his own spy network. Rather than becoming discouraged by their abject failure, the schemers were plotting to send another cadre of agents to agitate on Earth as a prelude to a mass armed invasion.
The cabal’s interests therefore included smearing Sogguth’s excellent reputation, chiefly through floating the rumour that his wife’s child was the reincarnation of Cthulhu, whose birth would alter the delicate balance of power in the universe. In addition to his other worries, therefore, Sogguth had to keep aware of attempts to assassinate his wife and her precious embryo. The closer their interstellar vehicle converged on Earth, the more insistent were the attacks. Five lone assassins thus far had been identified before they could execute their agenda, and they were arrested, tried, sentenced, and marooned accordingly on a prison planet closest to the vessel’s track.
Olive was aware of the perfidious attempts on the lives of Sogguth’s wife and gestating child, but she was having difficulty understanding the nature of the threat the mother and child posed to anyone. She decided to discuss the matter with her future husband.
‘Charles, these attempted assassinations make no sense to me. Can you explain them?’
‘They are senseless attempts by desperate, disgruntled individuals who are taking orders from the rival faction to Sogguth’s on the Universe Council. Basing their lies and innuendoes on ancient prophecies, the threat of recrudescence is, for them, not only dangerous but also lethal. By their lights, Cthulhu’s return would render them visible as traitors opposing the return to the status quo ante. They would therefore be rounded up and executed or imprisoned for life on some barely hospitable exomoon. Of course, no one can validate the truth of the old prophecies. But the factionalists don’t care about the truth, only about their current livelihoods.’
‘I agree that the assassins are misguided, but I see no way the Sogguths can fend off these vicious attacks forever. How do you think we can help them survive?’
Charles shook his head. ‘There is no guarantee of their survival. When people play at the level of Sogguth and his faction, everyone in the games they play is constantly at hazard . I believe they must like the constant danger, but in any case they certainly cannot escape it. Sogguth knows that Earth offers a kind of sanctuary for him. We can help by making this their family’s safe refuge.’
Olive was somewhat consoled by the thought that she and her future husband might help the Sogguths, but she now began to brood about optimising the environment for their time on Earth. She began to train mentally and physically to protect the guest family, and she did her best to make the couple know in her daily correspondence that she empathised with their plight and expected to do everything in her power to make their stay safe at the tenement for as long as they chose to remain there.
In the meantime, Charles and Olive were building out Sogguth’s lodging at the tenement with a nursery whose design was a tailored version of the one used by the PM’s amanuensis and his family. Their child had also been identified as a possible ‘second Cthulhu’ and was being trained for higher government service by his two brilliant parents. Olive had become the student of Dr. Sarah Millstone in space medicine and the teaching of paranormally gifted children. Sarah felt that the amanuensis’ youngster and Sogguth’s baby would be sympatico on account of their physical makeup—namely their numerous facial tentacles—and superior mental powers.
Already, the unborn child of Sogguth was being exposed to the Old Universe language, a practice endorsed by the philologist Ibngort Prbzt, who was designing the pre-birth language curriculum for the Sogguths, as he had done for the amanuensis’s child. Dr. Prbzt kept his eye out for hurdles in the new child’s development, but he and Sarah were astonished by how much an embryo could absorb and process while still in its mother’s confining womb.
Olive was a fast learner with a growing fascination with child development. As she planned her own wedding, she increasingly longed to bear a gifted child who might become friends with the babies around her. She was creative in her approach to designing security systems for what she termed ‘the incunabula interval.’ Inspired by stories of the baby Heracles, she made prototypes of robotic vipers that could be trained to protect babies from silent assassins. She explained to her future husband, ‘We can fabricate robots to accommodate themselves to act like humans, but making humans friendly to robots is another matter entirely.’
Charles and his father, the sheriff, had lengthy discussions about how to teach humans and hybrids to accept robots as equal partners in life. They agreed the problem set was going to be more difficult than getting humans and hybrids to ‘play nice in the sandbox together.’
On the vessel carrying the Sogguths, a sixth and a seventh assassin were identified and apprehended. Like the former five, they were subjected to judgment and offloaded to prison exomoons. Sogguth wrote about his bewilderment that such a large number of committed murderers had been sequestered on his spaceship before its launch. Through implemented interrogation, he had discovered the names of the Universe Council members who had backed the malefactors. The young man relayed this critical intelligence to his relatives on the Council, and they wrote back about how they had detained and arrested every one of the people that he had identified. When hot heads cooled, the relatives said, the plotters would be sent separately to prison facilities located throughout the universe.
Sogguth worried about the deep and abiding divisions amongst the Universe Council members. An empath and visionary, the young man foresaw a possible bloody civil war extending throughout the universe, but he had no idea what might stop the menace before it began. He wrote to the command centre that he needed the opinions of others to test and guide his own decisions regarding healing the diseased governance of the cosmos. The immediate result of his line of thought was an ongoing discussion among the PM, the sheriff, the philologist and their respective spouses. They felt they owed it to Sogguth to be his unbiased sounding board.
One evening Olive escorted her husband through the revamped living quarters of the Sogguths, including the nursery facility with its robots. When Charles saw the two vipers writhing in the crib, his first impulse was to kill them. Fortunately, his wife restrained him and picked up the two snakes, which coiled themselves around her arms and licked her hands with their forked tongues. ‘These robots are so lifelike they will fool almost any human. They are, however, deadly against anyone meaning to harm the infant lodged in this cradle.’
Olive showed her future husband how to trigger the language lessons that could be piped into the room. She laid the robotic snakes back in the crib and opened the cabinets of toys that lined the four walls. ‘I would like us to have a nursery just like this one. Now that I mention it, I think we should think of wedding before the Sogguths arrive. We must begin our own family as soon as possible.’ Her earnest gaze swept her man’s breath away. ‘I don’t mean to rush you, but my internal biological clock tells me it is time.’
‘My dear, how could I say no to your entreaty? You determine the date for our marriage, and that will be that. All the talk of other people’s gifted children has made me think of having babies of our own too. We will have to plan our honeymoon carefully so as not to neglect our duties, but we shall work things out to everyone’s satisfaction.’
‘I am going to be selfish, future husband. I want you voraciously, and I shall have you whenever you or I want us to be together. If that means we must chop up our honeymoon into a dozen weekends, so be it.’
‘Babies require a lot of attention, particularly precocious infants.’
‘I embrace the challenge. As for numbers, let’s have LOTS!’
‘Just remember you asked for them! After all, my father sired thirty clones, of which I am just the first of many.’
‘And your cloning is not out of the question to swell our numbers too.’
That evening in the hot tub, the betrothed pair announced the date of their marriage two weeks in the future. The sheriff, the space doctor, the Prbzts, the Prime Minister and his spouse, all applauded Charles and Olive, and everyone began kibitzing to flesh out the calendar. Fatty wanted to know where and when the couple would be honeymooning. The couple explained their predicament and urged everyone to be patient with them as they worked out all the details.
The schedule was a romp full of joyful events that filled the hours. As the Sogguths’ spacecraft hurtled through the black void of space, Charles and Olive pledged eternal faithfulness to each other. Then, the two did sequential disappearing acts together. Each time they returned flushed with excitement and beaming with good humour. Sometimes they left the vicinity of Picklock Street entirely, popping up again with tales of their adventures in the Lake District or Brighton or Penzance. Olive never looked so fresh and vivacious. Charles, whose dating life had been truncated by his industry, seemed energised by new explorations of his fair lady’s charms.
Two months of spontaneous absences were followed by two more months of long passages of late arrivals and early departures, and the newlyweds had the update Dr. Sarah had been expecting: Olive announced she was with child. Medical imagery showed her strenuous efforts had not been in vain. In her womb were the signs of two embryo Cthulhus. To celebrate this happy occasion, Charles and Olive went back to their rooms for more exercise. Now even non-experts could detect the matronly signs in the former waitress of the Cracked Bell pub. She would not deliver her twins before the Sogguths arrived, but those infants would not come long afterwards.
The mating rituals of Charles and Olive had not interrupted the couple’s arduous duties on behalf of national security. Olive had shared her connubial experiences with the Sogguths, the Prbzts, and the elder Millstones. Aspiring to be part of the joy, Dr. Sarah announced that Mrs. Prbzt and she were both pregnant, and as the space vessel offloaded the Sogguths, the ladies all shared their pregnancy bumps while Mrs. Sogguth transitioned to the birthing room at the tenement where she promptly went into labour.
The birth of little Cthulhu was a flawless delivery, presided over by the noticeably pregnant Dr. Sarah. The robotic snakes, which everyone had forgotten about, served their purpose when a lone assassin found his way into the Sogguths’ suite and nursery and found himself riddled with viper bites, from which he expired in agony.
The night of the birth, everyone except the exhausted new mother gathered in the hot tub where Sogguth summarised the situation at the Universe Council. When he had finished, he said, ‘It is good to be back in a land of comparative Arcadian peace. Thank you for providing us sanctuary.’
Sir Douglas laughed and said, ‘Sogguth, you and your wife have been instrumental in fostering three pregnancies that I know of. If every one of your returns caused such an explosion of births, I would encourage you to come and go with regularity. Speaking of events worth lauding, the Lady Lucille and I have an announcement too: she is pregnant and scheduled to deliver around the time of Dr. Sarah’s delivery. Isn’t that so, Sarah?’
Both Lady Lucille and Dr. Sarah positively beamed with pride. The moon-faced sheriff shook his head. The Sogguths’ journey had been full of adventures aboard as well as off the spacecraft. Now everything had to be digested, and the new arrivals must take precedence as the earthlings settled back into some sort of sustainable routine.
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