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Discovery of the Ghooric Zone - novelette by Richard A Lupoff



Discovery of the Ghooric Zone
a novelette by Richard A Lupoff
Foreword
This story was first published in 1977 in Chrysalis, edited by Roy
Torgeson. It was reprinted in the 1990 edition of Tales of the Cthulhu
Mythos, edited by the late Jim Turner. Torn between modesty and pride,
rather than comment on the story in my own words I'll quote what Jim said
about it:
"'Discovery of the Ghooric Zone' is not just a distinguished Mythos tale;
it is the only Mythos tale I have ever encountered by an author other than
Lovecraft that conveys some sense of the iconoclastic audacity that
attended the initial publication of Lovecraft's work and that so outraged
the contemporary readership of Astounding Stories. In this brilliant
narrative Lupoff has managed to include not only the requisite Mythos
terminology but also the essential ambiance of cosmic wonder, and then
additionally has re-created some of the mind-blasting excitement of those
original Mythos stories."
'Discovery of the Ghooric Zone' is reprinted in Claremont Tales by Richard
A Lupoff, published in April 2001 by Golden Gryphon Press.

Discovery of the Ghooric Zone
They were having sex when the warning gong sounded, Gomati and Njord and
Shoten. The shimmering, fading Sound indicated first long-range contact
with the remote object, the long-suspected but never-before-visited tenth
planet that circled far beyond the eccentric orbit of Pluto, rolling about
its distant primary with irrational speed, its huge mass bathed in eternal
darkness and incredible cold some sixteen billion kilometers from the
remote, almost invisible sun.
Gomati was the female member of the ship's crew. She was tall, nearly two
meters from the top of her satiny smooth scalp to the tips of her
glittering tin-alloy toenails. When the gong sounded she burst into a
cascade of rippling laughter, high-pitched and mirthful, at the
incongruity of the cosmic event's impingement upon the fleshly.
The ship had launched from Pluto even though at this point in Pluto's
orbit it was less distant from the sun than was Neptune. Fabricated in the
nearly null-gravity conditions of Neptune's tiny moon Nereid, the ship had
been ferried back, segment by segment, for assembly, for the cyborging of
its scores of tiny biotic brains, on-loading of its three-member crew and
its launch from the cratered rock surface of Pluto.
Njord, the male crew member, cursed, distracted by the radar gong, angered
by Gomati's inattention, humiliated by her amusement and by her drawing
away from himself and Shoten. Njord felt his organ grow flaccid at the
distraction, and for the moment he regretted the decision he had made
prior to the cyborging operations of his adolescence, to retain his
organic phallus and gonads. A cyborged capability might have proven more
potently enduring in the circumstances but Njord's pubescent pride had