The Statement of Fred Carter
Dirigibletrance asks whether the short story “One Bright Star to Guide Them” takes place in the same background universe, or "Evernverse" as LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS?
I don’t know, but I do not see why it could not. In general, the way to see whether or not two books might take place in the same background, (what we professionals call “The Planetary Question”) is to explain positive evidence, such as when two stories are sharing the same names and events, and to explain away possible negative evidence, such when two stories contain as clearly incompatible events or characters or laws of nature. For example, much as we would all like for Blackie DuQuesne to go to planet Lyrane IX and obtain the power of the Melasnikov ‘s Black Lensmen corps, nonetheless Blackie comes from the Skylark universe, where the Seaton’s serendipitous discovery of the cupric total conversion space-drive disproves Einsteinian Relativity, whereas the Lensman universe has Einsteinian relativity, but found that inertialess matter was not subject to the Lorenz transformation. These two cannot co-exist, so they cannot be part of the same background universe, unless the continuum occupied by Seaton and DuQuesne were reached by hyperspatial tube by the Eddorians, or the continuum occupied by Civilization reached by Fourth Dimensional Gizmo by the Skylarkers.
In this case, the question of whether “One Bright Star” exists in the Evernessverse is an interesting one: The set up of the worlds or world involved sounds similar. The themes of the stories and the laws of nature in the magic system sound the same. But to answer thoroughly would require following up obscure clues and thinking about it.
Instead, I will send Randolf Carter down into the basement to check. Maybe someone just wrote the answer down somewhere, among all those musty old papers left by my grandfather Melchizedech Faustus Wright, the arctic explorer, were stored after he died screaming in the Innsmouth insane asylum. I will stay up here in the solarium, where it is safe, watching the sunset and sipping tea. He and I will remain in communication over telephone.
Hm. Over the phone line, Carter says he has found a crate containing some old paperbacks from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. It seems that the Space Trilogy of C.S. Lewis is in the same background as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, on the grounds that Merlin speaks the language of "Numinor", which is identified as Atlantis. Wait. He has found a deeper and darker staircase, leading even further down. Evidently Grampa Melch built a wine cellar without telling anyone.
Carter has not reported anything for hours. I have heard strange noises over the phone wire, like the sound of raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom. What is going on in the basement?
Ah. Carter has found a handwritten note, drawn in shaky, spider-thin handwriting in the margin of a copy of the Comte d’Erlette’s CULTES DES GOULES which is padlocked on a musty shelf next to the unredacted first edition of Tobin’s SPIRIT GUIDE published in America under the name Gary Gygax’s DIETIES and DEMIGODS—the edited versions leave out secret gods, including those of Lankhmar, Chaos and Cthulhu which the abino assassins workingfor the prelature of Opus Dei wish the world to know nothing of! The marginalia note says my own ‘Everness’ trilogy takes place in the background universe of H.P. Lovecraft’s DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH, since certain names and places of the general dreamlands are mentioned there. KADATH ties into several other Lovecraftian stories, including "Pickman’s Model". This means that the other Cthulhu Mythos stories are all tied in, including the tales of Robert E. Howard.
One of the King Kull stories, “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales, August 1929) is a Mythos tale. Certain Conan stories contain strongly Cthulhian elements, but nothing is perfectly clear. The dark god Dagon, who appears in at least one Conan story, is a Cthulhian deity: but this god is also mentioned in SAMPSON AGONESTES by Milton, as the deity served by the Philistines, so whether this link is enough to show that those two tales must share a common background is unclear.
Carter is going deeper. Apparently there is a vast cave or cavern under my house, with abysses that go ever further, darkness no ray of sun has ever reached….
The voice over the phone line is strained and strange now. He speaks of forests of giant petrified mushrooms. I wonder if Carter’s mind has cracked under the strain. He has found an antique glyph, first seen on the tower of Koth, whose strange angles imply that Gene Wolfe’s AN EVIL GUEST refers to Cthulhu, and also to the sinister vigilante gangland speaks of in whispers only as The Shadow, so these tales must take place in the same background universe. The cryptic name ‘Woldercan’ is found scribbled in blood on the stones of the cavern floor. What does it mean? Carter is shouting and glibbering now, saying he must find the clue from Doctor Lao. Or maybe he said Dr. No, which would tie into the James Bond universe. I am not sure what Carter is on about. I shout into the phone on my end, begging Carter to turn back.
The trail of blood leads to the bloated corpse of Mr. Wold Newton, father of all the Wold Newton families. We all know that Newton was secretly a Shoggoth of Ubbo Sathla from a secret fortress buried beneath Mount Erebus in Anarctica, whose myriad pseudopods reached everywhere in literature. According to Philip Jose Farmer, practically everyone is related to everyone else, from Fu Manchu to Doctor Who to Sherlock Holmes to Captain Nemo to Blackie Du Quesne. They are all cousins or something. Farmer’s Wold Newton families are like the movie THE LONGEST DAY when you are playing ‘Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon’– if you can tie a movie into THE LONGEST DAY, then you can get anywhere across the movie connections to anywhere else. If Anton Pendrake from LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS is not a member of the Wold Newton family, he might as well be.
But wait! Carter has found what he describes as a strange yet multiangular cryptic door in the floor! He wishes to go deeper. No, Carter, No! Turn back before it is too late!
In the appendix I attached to the back of MISTS OF EVERNESS, I make reference to the previous Guardians of Everness, which included the Gordon family– both Commissioner Gordon and ‘Flash’ Gordon are cousins — the Rogers line — ‘Buck’ Rogers is the grandson of Steve Rogers the Captain America — and the Carter family — John Carter, warlord of Mars, is a relation of our own Randolph Carter — not to mention the Reid family, so ergo the Green Hornet Britt Reid and the Lone Ranger Dan Reid are clearly blood relatives of Merlin the Magician and Galen Waylock from Everness!
Whether or not Adam Wayne, the Napoleon of Notting Hill, is any relation to Bruce Wayne or Mad Anthony Wayne, is a question Wold Newton scholar still debate. The links between Dr. John Hawley Griffin, the Invisible Man, and THRUSH, the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and Subjugation of Humanity, are more transparent.
Carter is now speaking tothe pshent-bearing preists Nasht and Kaman-Thah, who guard the Cavern of the Sacred Flame which lies nearby the Gates of Lesser Slumber. The conversation is in a hoary and archaic dialect of Egyptian, called Older Pnakotic, once spoken in the nameless land beyond the Third Cataract, whose buzzing clicks and glottal stops no linguist has ever been able to explain, but which Professor Moriarty’s monograph The Dynamics of An Asteroid (long since suppressed by the British Royal Society and MI 9, the Crown’s anti-occultism branch), implied in one ambiguous passage might be the linguistic form of a non-human vocal cavity. How did Carter know this dialect? What might they be saying?? The voices are husht and trembling with fear–that much is clear!
From the sound of his footfalls, I can tell over the phone wire that Carter is descending a long stairway of cyclopean steps, probably of basalt or onyx—I have practiced judging the eldritch mineral composition of stairs by their peculiar echoes, to be able to tell such things. The stairways seems to descend into the purple prose of overwritten weird tales from the pulp era! Carter is muttering to himself, and I can catch only fragments of his wheezing monologue.
Carter — if I have peiced together his sentence fragments correctly — is saying that Merlin from Everness is the exact same Merlin who appears in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, when Merlin is raised from the dead by the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments when Reverend Straik chanted the ascending node of the charm of Yogg Sothoth — agreed, this scene is not actually on stage in C.S. Lewis’s work, but its presence can be inferred, if for no other reason that the famous British Library copy of Lewis’ original manuscript was one of the first things edited by the Martian invaders from Horshell Common when their fighting machines briefly occupied London not so long ago. Obviously they wished that passage to be removed, so that future readers would not reveal the secret to the Great Race of Yith, whose agents, their minds occupied by Beings from Other Aeons, move among us even now! The removed scene evidently had Merlin, once raised from the dead, descend upon the N.I.C.E. headquarters, and cast Phandaal’s Excellent Confusion of Tongues on thinly-disguised versions of H.G. Wells and Ayn Rand, the same 10th level spell that Maal Dweb, sorcerer of Xiccarph, used to baffle the arrogance of Nimrod, the antediluvian giant whose mighty tower, by absorbing the Telluric Current from the mystic treasure-city of Hamunaptra (where the Lost Brass Tablets of Enoch repose) attempted to breach the quarentine of Deep Heaven, opening dream-channels to Barsoom and Amtor (allowing both Carter and Napier to reach across time in astral form, like Julian the Seventh, to epoch when these far spheres were occupied with human life) and this blasphemous attempt so offended the Eldil of Arbol, and so threatened the cosmos-spanning reign of Maal Dweb, that the two together, heavenly and hellish powers, worked the Will of Maledil and destroyed the ambitions of Nimrod.
Once Merlin had accomplished a similar destruction, and the secret of Professor Weston’s Cavorite sphere was lost forever, the archmagician was recaptured by the Guardians of Everness and re-imprisoned in Wailing Blood at the World’s Edge. Merlin’s teacher was a magician named Bleys, who is clearly Bleys of Amber, and the Amberites are clearly fighting the force of Chaos, whose chieftains are Arioch, Xiombarg, and Mabelode the Faceless. One of those gods of evil did not even bother to change his name when he descended (or will descend) on Urth of the Lattermost Days during the time of the Dying Sun, for enemies of the New Sun are still called Erebus, Abaia, Scylla and …. Arioch! This latter Name of Power is also mentioned in other ancient sources, as the Five Books of Moses, the couplet of the mad Arab Al-Hazred, and the verses of the blind poet Milton. Hear, us, O Increate! We pray the Conciliator will come soon, or else the Urth will lift her western margin to over the face of the sun one final time, and the Last Winter will rule unending, or so the Ecclesiarchs aver.
So what about the links between ‘One Bright Star’ and the Everness books? It is a perfectly valid geek question, which anyone who sees the links between planet Oa and planet Arisia could answer. C’Mon, Carter, out with it!
Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:
"I can’t tell you, Wright! It’s too utterly beyond thought–I dare not tell you–no man could know it and live–Great God! I never dreamed of this!"
But Carter! Carter! Can you hear me? I was not asking if the Tower of Babel myth was somehow tied in to the Cthulhu Mythos, Severians Urth, Morcock’s Eternal Champion or Zelazny’s Amber! I just wanted to know if Everness takes place in the same background universe as ‘One Bright Star to Guide Them’? It is a simple question, you fool! Why are you descending into the unspeakable terror of the unutterable ineffable?
“Wright! It is too late for me! Close the basement door, sell the house, change your name and move to Fiji! Flee for your life—no! For your very sanity! Also, invest in gold! I don’t like the volatility of the stock market right now! T-Bonds are not safe! They’re not safe, I say! AAAUURRGGGHHHH!“ Then a hideous wail, like the cry of a soul in utmost torment, rang in my ears, so that I almost swooned for faintness, and the very stars at my solarium windows seemed to sway dizzyingly above a mephitic yet cthonnic bottomless abyss of leering yet blasphemous, eldritch yet nigrescently sable, tenebrous, stygian , aphotic, caliginous, crepuscular, gloomy darkness!!
Carter?! Carter, are you there? What about that ‘One Bright Star’ question?
But after a while there is a further clicking in the receiver, and I strain my ears to listen. Again I call down, "Carter, are you there?" and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, to account for that thing–that voice–nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied?
"You fool, Carter is FRED!"
Fred? What does that mean? That makes no sense at all. Carter is Fred? His name is Randolph, not Frederick. After all that spooky build up, some wisecrack about Fred? Maybe it is a reference to Fred Saberhagen’s Berseker series? If the Berserker machines had been built on planet Skyros, where the Daleks hail from, that would be kind of cool. Daleks have been known to sail the time-stream, appearing in both the future and past of the city of Tanelorn, which the vulger call Amber, and I know the Time Lords have been fighting the Great Race of Yith ever since the Fourth Recreation of the multiverse by Dworkin.
Carter is Fred, huhn? There must have been a bad connection. Maybe the Voice From Beyond was actually saying something else. Aw, who cares? Carter was an annoying little man anyway. Good riddens. Serves him right, poking around in Things We Were Not Meant to Know.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
