The Milestones Are Right

Arioch glares at the Mi Go squatting awkwardly on an office chair on the other side of the table.

The Mi-Go regards Arioch with equal distaste through its curious organs of vision.

Since the cult-in-government inflicted its sacrificial decimations upon the bureaucracy, the bureaux in the City of Witches and on Yuggoth were amalgamated. Adjustments were hard on both worlds. Arioch is very sceptical of the advertised financial efficiency, considering the expense of rebuilding locally the cyclopean, windowless basalt temples the Mi-Go inhabit. There is also the language problem. Arioch, a veteran of the arcane traditions of the bureaumancers, finds the polychromatic jargon of the modern business solar system frustrating.

Ecru. Smaragdine wenge azure. the Mi-Go pulses with what, on any normal person, would be a forehead. This one also uses it as a place to wear a tie. It’s a shiny green tie.

“Again? We went over this at our last meeting,” says Arioch. “We can’t bring forward the completion milestone because bureaucracy in a hurry leads to holes in Space–Time. In this bureau, we have Procedures. On this planet, we still have a crust.”

Sinoper. Sarcoline, murrey amaranth, taupe. The Mi-Go emphasises the last shade with a clatter of one of its grooming claws on the tabletop. Coincidentally, the Mi-Go’s iPhone buzzes pregnant with new import. The Mi-Go immediately checks it, buzzing to itself in bistre and drunk-tank pink.

This is another thing Arioch dislikes about the bureaucrats from Yuggoth: they are grafted to their cellphones.

Arioch waits, seething, while the Mi-Go shoots a quick text back to its cohort. When he is pretty sure he has its attention again, he tries to show it a chart showing the size of the holes in Space–Time that resulted from the last arbitrarily truncated bureaucratic project. The Mi-Go gestures contemptuously with its feathery basidiocarps and utters a series of colours Arioch can barely follow. Several of them seem to be from spectra other than Earth’s. Arioch thinks that’s unprofessional: the Bureaumantic Code specifies Euclidean chromosemantics are to be used at all times.

Nacarat onyx. Aeneous nacarat gamboge!

Arioch is angry now. That was uncalled-for. “It’s not a matter of the Stars Being Right. It’s a matter of due diligence and not blowing holes in Space–Time. I don’t care if your demiurge wants it ahead of the project plan, nor about its—and your—career aspirations.”

Atrous icterine subfusc?

“By all means. Refer it all the way up to your demiurge. You know I’m in the right, and you’re just a corner-cutting fungal cowboy. Crepusc in your own subfusc!”

Falu.

“Falu too.”

That went well, Arioch thought later.

Blind date from Yuggoth

"What was I thinking?" she asks herself whenever she remembers last night.

So embarrassing.

He had been charming enough. They met in a supermarket queue. Attentive, humorous, modestly ostentatious. The gold filigrees embossed into his chitinous carapace advertised his trendoid edginess. His shopping trolley showed he ate healthy - frozen prawns, sambal oelek, potting mix, cloudy ammonia, cat food. He worked in advertising. He lived alone. He drove a Lexus. He asked her out for coffee.

Throwing her mother's advice about paracosmic horror to the interstellar winds, she had agreed.

The first clue that he could not be The One For Her was the bouquet of luscious long-stem shiitakes he gave her when they met at a cafe in town. Stubbornly undaunted, she wrestled down her disquiet over the following coffee and cake, and tried not to stare at the curious organs he used to ingest the contents of his cup and plate.

But the second clue was the attention he paid to the waiter. Or more properly, the waiter's shining brocade waistcoat. The glittering threads mesmerised him and he started to pulse colours in time with the reflections on the increasingly embarrassed waiter's torso.

The third, and final, clue was his offer to take her home to meet his hive queen on Pluto. He explained it would be necessary to extract her brain and place it into a cannister of transmundane metals that would keep it alive and moderately sane for the decades it would take to transport her there and back. He explained he had to take a trip home and wanted her company. When she demurred he confessed he had fallen in instant and impetuous love with her, and wanted nothing more than to unite their brains in mycophilous glory until Yog Sothoth Returns. He stretched a clawed tendril across the table to stroke her fingers.

She stormed out, leaving him to pay. What a creep! On a first date!

Fun guy from Yuggoth? No chance.

The aquarium

Jeremy keeps mi-go. In his living-room he has a 100-litre tank stocked with about a dozen tropical mi-go of various colours - green, red, orange, mottled. At night, under the UV light in the tank, they glitter with pale fluroescence as they display their antennae-lights to each other, a constellation of tiny eldritch horror. During the day they shelter dreamily among the non-Euclidean basalt monoliths that Jeremy had imported for them. Occasionally they make forays across the tank's pale grey gritty substrate, singly or in groups of three or seven, leaving little trails of intricate occult import in their wakes. Sometimes, when all else in the house is quiet, Jeremy thinks he hears them clicking to each other with their tiny crab-claws over the constant humming and bubbling of the filter. He has begun to think he understands them, although he laughs this off self-deprecatingly.

Jeremy has kept things in tanks since he was a child. Starting off with goldfish and sea-monkeys in a glass bowl, he spent his pocket-money on ever grander tanks and more finicky occupants. He had his failures, of course: the yabbies cooked when a filter short-circuited and the octopus kept escaping, getting as far as the bus-stop down the road before expiring. The mi-go are by far his most complex project. He wrote a web article on the best way to use LEDs to simulate the stars being right to keep the fungi alive, how to reproduce the transmundane essences that they feed on, and how to stop their chelating fungal dreams clogging the tank's filter. He idly dreams about becoming an authority among aquariumists on keeping mi-go. He hopes that his pets will someday breed, but no one has managed that with captive mi-go since Alhazred's day. He studies the ancient sage's cryptic aquarium notes for hints on how to make the stars right for the fungi to sporulate.

Jeremy's wife Deb hates her husband's obsession with the star-fungi, and especially the way they gather at the front of the tank to observe her when she's watching 'Idol'. Given half a chance Deb would get rid of them or kill them - a kettle of boiling water over the lot! She has begun to think the repulsive little beasts know her intentions and mock her for her inability to act on them.

Deb knows the old adage that pet-owners come to look like their pets. Is Jeremy growing more fungal? Have his ears and nose begun to glitter at night? All she knows is the longer the little beasts are in her house, the less she wants Jeremy to touch her.

Deb has bought an Elder Sign on eBay and keeps it in her handbag, despite its brooding heaviness. One excuse, one final straw, and she will not hesitate to use it on him.