The Cauldron (24 page)

How many tiny islands had he occupied?

He glanced at Jerrah. Her eyes were wide, and they were riveted on his face, but her expression, emphasized by the tenseness of her body, was of someone poised to jump out of the car and flee.

There was a flood of memories out there in the darkness, waiting to wash over him, he sensed … if only he would open the gates to his mind and let them in. But some part of him wanted to keep them at bay, keep all the little islands separate.

When John Miller had come into being, it had been simple. He’d taken Tina with him through the fog, and she’d become Ellen. Had he brought her along with him before?

“Oh, what the hell.” Suddenly he opened the gates to his mind and gripped the wheel so hard he thought it might crumble in his hands. His breath sucked in with a hiss and the world around him vanished, sending him whirling through emptiness. And then his nightmares were enveloping him, drowning him.

There was the solid, crystal clear memories of John Miller and Petey. But around these memories hovered an aura of vagueness and unreality, the scenes and sounds, so many thoughts had been his at one time. They belonged to him, but they were not a part of him now.

There was the name—Delphoros, so familiar and at the same time alien and distant. His tongue could not form it properly. And there was the world with the pink-tinged sky, Elthor, which seemed like a watercolor rendered by a drug-addled artist. It was another person’s world, not his.

There was the icy, shifting grayness:
otherspace
. Dark matter. Something that could not precisely be defined but through which it was possible to travel exceedingly fast to other stars. Something which only one in a billion Elthorans had been able to navigate.

And there was all that had gone on with his being that one in a billion: One Who Sees. Privileges, protection, the near-immortality that was partly a gift of science and partly a result of entering
otherspace
. Each time he entered
otherspace
it was a form of death, and the subsequent emergence into time-and-space was a form of rebirth. The rejuvenation effect spilled over to his physical body; it was why he’d never suffered the vagaries of growing old, and why Ellen had lost a few decades from her form. It was sort of a mind-over-matter that kept him the same—incarnation through incarnation: Esbiorn, Petey, John Miller, Carl Johnson.

“Finding me here, Melusine, is it like finding a resurrected Merlin, still able to perform his spells for Arthur after a thousand years in the grave?”

She stared at him mutely.

“How many lives have I lived, Melusine? Do you have any way of knowing?”

“No.”

“Then can you tell me what happened to the other navigators? Why I’m so damned important because—”

“As I have said again and again. There are only three left that I know of.” She talked haltingly. “The one on our ship above, one the Alzur stole and is on their ship, and you. Fewer and fewer with the gift were born on Elthor, navigators, a species going extinct.” She paused: “Soon all of them to be extinct unless you can be used to—”

“Create more?”

“That is a possibility.”

“Like breeding stock, eh? So that’s the real reason why I’m so damned important. I’m breeding stock.” He gestured, taking one hand off the wheel. “Stud service.”

“We have other ships, they just can’t travel through
otherspace
without a navigator, only real, physical space. And we have marooned crews, ships where the navigators must have died, as we’ve lost all contact with them. None of those crews successfully rescued, the ships probably following routes programmed into them or gone rogue. Travel between worlds is so limited now. But
otherspace
—”

“And your shipkeeper wants to limit it even more by killing me.”

“I do not know why, or what is going on. I cannot return to my body. And I cannot contact the ship.”

“Wrong,” Carl said, drawing the word out. “This is all very wrong. So why can’t you contact your ship? Just what do you think went wrong?”

“I have no answer.”

Carl stared at the road ahead and forced his eyes wide. He was tired, very, and his stomach rumbled from hunger. “Could what’s going wrong have anything to do with that man who showed up outside the resort, the shipkeeper, the one with the … weapon … that I—”

“—sent into
otherspace
?” She shook her head. “Yes, that was the shipkeeper. Maybe he only wanted to talk, and—” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Talk? With a gun or whatever the hell it was? Maybe he’s why you can’t contact the ship. Maybe he doesn’t want you to. Maybe for whatever reason he wants
otherspace
travel to end. Not a bad notion, by the way. Maybe—”

“His mind perhaps has become fouled; it is said that
otherspace
can warp the senses of some individuals. He might think you are powerful, maybe too powerful, and therefore must be weakened.”

“Weakened? How about killed?”

“Perhaps he thinks Delphoros is not a boon, but a threat. I get a sense of that from Jerrah’s thoughts. The shipkeeper left impressions. I can tell that you concerned him. He considered killing you with a knife, or maybe just seriously hurting you, weakening you. It is confusing. He is frightened and—”

“So why would he keep you from contacting the ship? Or the ship’s navigator maybe?” Carl scowled. “Maybe he thinks you and your navigator would try to stop him from killing me.”

“There is no way to know,” she said. “I cannot contact the ship, and therefore I cannot talk to the navigator or the shipkeeper.”

“Well, maybe I have a way to find out.”

***

Chapter 39

The Navigator

He urgently wanted to speak with the shipkeeper. Something terrible was transpiring, weapons were firing and being energized again. A battle, certainly. Against the Alzur. He’d taken the ship through
otherspace
to get closer, at the shipkeeper’s request.

To better communicate with them.

Had the Alzur broken the treaty and fired? Had this ship returned fire? It certainly had fired at something, exhausting the energy reserve; everything had been thrown into the blasts. And it was getting ready to do so again. The navigator could feel the crew stoking the reservoir in the deck below. He could feel the shipkeeper pacing, hovering near Melusine’s station, and then pacing again. He could sense the nervousness—in the crew below, in the shipkeeper, and in the ship itself. Nothing from Melusine. She must be absorbed with the liaison.

The navigator flashed the light above his tank. He could not verbalize his questions. He’d lost the ability to talk after being submerged in the nutrient fluid. The fluid constantly filled his throat and nose; he breathed it and swallowed it and eliminated it. But he could talk with his mind, when the shipkeeper or Melusine connected to the liaison. Though he craved their company, rarely did he ask for the connection.

He asked now, however. He wanted to know what transpired. He could see the light flashing, and he urged it faster and brighter as if that would be the equivalent of someone shouting: “Here! Talk to me!”

But neither the shipkeeper nor Melusine approached his tank. He’d sensed Melusine at her post some time ago, but he could not sense her now. This troubled him that she would be with the liaison for so long. He could “feel” the shipkeeper, and the crew on the deck below. He could feel the pulse of the ship. But nothing from Melusine.

“Here! Talk to me!” his mind screamed. The light blinked so fast now it appeared one sustained glow. “Here! Here! Here!”

The shipkeeper came close, and the navigator prepared to link with his mind through the liaison. So many questions to ask. But then the shipkeeper padded away, and the navigator felt the buildup of energy beneath him, followed by the release.

The weapons had fired again.

The ship was moving, though not of his doing. The shipkeeper was taking it somewhere in time-and-space. The navigator was only necessary for traveling in
otherspace
.

“Here! Here! Where are we going?”

The weapons fired again and again.

A whine filled the navigator’s senses and he had the sensation of falling. The ship was landing somewhere.

His light went dark for several minutes; he put all his effort into sensing what was transpiring. No Melusine, and after a time, no shipkeeper. The ship’s heart-engine hummed, and the navigator guessed at the passage of time. Then he sensed the shipkeeper return again and felt the ship rising.

The shipkeeper was anxious about something, and angry.

“Here! Here!”

He knew the shipkeeper could see the flashing light and that he was requesting a conversation. But the shipkeeper continued to ignore him.

Why?

The navigator decided to force communication. The shipkeeper could not pilot the ship in
otherspace
; that was the navigator’s realm. He would take the ship there and hold it. He would be defying the shipkeeper, something he had never done before and had never considered.

He tried one last time to get the shipkeeper to talk to him.

“Here! Talk to me.”

But the shipkeeper padded farther away.

And so the navigator took the ship into
otherspace
 … before the shipkeeper could give him an order. The shipkeeper ruled in time-and-space, and the navigator always obeyed him then. But
otherspace
? He had some measure of freedom there. Even though he remained in his nutrient tank prison, he was temporarily free from following orders. He knew that at best his move was a stalemate. The shipkeeper would be helpless as long as the navigator held the ship in
otherspace
. In turn, the navigator would become helpless the moment he allowed the ship to return to time-and-space … at which time he would face the shipkeeper’s wrath. But he would hold the ship in
otherspace
until the shipkeeper talked to him.

This time he noticed shadowy shapes in the fog of
otherspace
. He’d seen the shapes before, a few times, but never so many, and never so close.

He flashed his light faster to get the shipkeeper’s attention.

You will talk to me now, he thought.

***

Chapter 40

Carl Johnson

The sun was high, the towns becoming fewer and farther between. He’d taken a route away from the interstate, going from one country road to the next. The drunk might have had the presence of mind to call the police and report his car stolen, and so taking the busier roads, where chances were greater of seeing police or sheriff’s deputies patrolling, was not an option. He’d stopped for gas at a speck of a town shortly after dawn, the attendant announcing there were no restrooms for the customers.

The hills began to rise more steeply, and the string-straight stretches of worn blacktop that were common to the northern part of the state were replaced by ever-sharper curves. It would be another fifty miles or so before all traces of the plains were gone, swallowed up by the hills and valleys that dominated the southern third of the state.

Ellen napped in the backseat, or pretended to, Carl thought. He and Jerrah/Melusine shared the front.

Since leaving the rest area, neither of them had spoken. Carl had driven automatically, following his feelings. And with each turn he took, the feelings had grown more pronounced—until now, even before the next branch in the road, he was already anticipating the direction he would take. To the left, ever farther south, ever farther into the hills.

For an instant the world seemed to waver around him, as if he looked through warped glass. He blinked, giving his head a momentary shivering shake.

“Did you—” he began, then stopped as the wavering returned. Ahead, at the top of the hill they were climbing, a barn and other buildings seemed to melt and to shift as if they were cloud formations on a windy day. And the road—

Carl slammed on the brakes. The tires squealed loudly and the car swayed, then swerved, almost out of control. Carl felt like he’d been wrapped in a frigid cocoon. The car skidding on the shoulder now, the tires scraping along the gravel, until finally it came to a stop and the world returned to normal. The farm buildings were solid, as was the road and the car itself. The hillside pastures on either side were once again steady, and the only motion was a cow that looked up and stared placidly at them from a hundred feet away.

“What?” Ellen was sitting bolt upright in the back seat. “What happened?”

Carl blinked again and took his foot from the brake and placed it tentatively on the accelerator. The car inched slowly toward the top of the hill.

“I don’t know,” he said softly. “Everything seemed to waver. But it’s all right now.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, Ellen.” He gave her a half-amused snort. “As sure as I am about anything.”

“Has it happened before?” Jerrah looked concerned.

“No. Just a bit of dizziness.”

“Do you feel all right?”

“Yeah, Ellen. I think so.”

“Do you want me to drive?” Ellen rubbed at the sleep in her eyes.

“No. Not for a while anyway.”

The car topped the hill and began to accelerate to normal speed again.

Ahead there was a cluster of trees, a half-dozen picnic tables, a small concrete building, and space for a dozen cars. It was a well-maintained county park, and the baseball field behind it had been recently mowed, the bleachers painted grass-green. A good place to stop.

Carl’s feet crunched over the gravel that led to the restrooms. The soles of his feet were cracked and bloody. He cursed himself for not putting shoes on when he’d run that night from Jerrah. Maybe he could stop at a K-Mart and buy some. He gave another clown laugh. He’d left his wallet back in the cabin that had been obliterated.

Maybe he could steal a pair somewhere.

It was shaded by elms, oaks, and a single large weeping willow. He heard cars whooshing by on a main road on the other side of the park, the occasional rumble of a truck, and in the brief silences between, he heard the wind rustling the leaves and his own breath.

“Maybe the shipkeeper was just trying to scare you,” Jerrah/Melusine had suggested before they pulled in. “Back at the resort, when he fired the ship’s—”

“Scare me by blasting Ellen’s house into slivers?” Carl raised his voice. “By coming down here with his ray gun or whatever the hell it was—”

“—I just can’t believe he would want you dead. I mean, I think he was trying to kill you, hurt you, but I just can’t …. You’re so very important,” Jerrah had said. “I know it
looked
like he tried to kill you.”

“Important? He’d prefer I was dead.”

Jerrah caught up to him outside the door to the men’s room. Ellen stood there, looking at them, then went around the other side to the ladies’ room.

“I have been thinking, Delphoros—”

“Call me Carl,” he returned. “That’s my name.”
Now
, he added to himself.

“Carl, you have taken us through
otherspace
. Twice. Can you use it to go to the ship?”

He pushed open the door and went inside. She followed him. It was cool in here, damp from yesterday’s rain, and smelling of urine and cleaning products.

“I don’t know. Until yesterday I had no control over going into the fog. It just happened. Yesterday … last night … was different. Yeah, I feel certain I could go into the fog again, if I tried. But going to your ship? How the hell do I find it? I only ended up near the resort, and then at the rest area because I’d been there before. They were familiar. I’ve never set foot on your ship.”

“But you’ve … set foot …” she seemed to find the expression odd “ … on a ship, your ship. They have to be similar.”

Carl brushed past her and went into the stall. “Do you mind? Ladies are supposed to pee in the other bathroom.”

He heard the door bang open and closed.

“They have to be similar, the ships,” he said. He pictured a control room surrounded by the same kind of grayness of the fog he slipped through. Was it a memory? Or another fragment of a nightmare, this time somehow intruding into his waking consciousness? “This ship—”

Could he find it? Could he swim his way through
otherspace
and find Melusine’s ship? Could it possibly be that easy?

He found a soda machine behind the park building and jimmied it open and got three bottles before returning to the car.

“Where are we going?” Ellen asked. She sat in the front seat this time.

“To where I landed … crashed. Somehow I think I can find the spot.”

Ellen stared blankly ahead, fingers wrapped tightly around the soda bottle. In the backseat, Jerrah leaned forward with interest.

“We have to go farther south,” Carl said. He pulled in a deep breath and pressed down on the accelerator. The two halves of his mind maintained an uneasy truce as the car sped on and the day melted.

They had to walk the last quarter mile as the sun was just starting to set.

A narrow dirt road they’d turned down had become a footpath, at best, with wide deep ruts on one side. It was half obscured by weeds and grass, and it ended in a small clearing a couple hundred yards into the woods. From the beer cans, empty cigarette packs, and other litter, it was apparent people still came here—teenagers most likely. The main road behind them was well out of sight of the clearing, and even the sound of an occasional passing car faded as the trio threaded its way through the trees beyond.

Though the area beyond was not fenced, it looked untouched. There were no trails and no sections less overgrown than others. Fallen branches and even rotted trees had not been removed, just left to decay on the ground, gradually being devoured by the soil.

He felt it, an aura of protection, some field generated by the ship’s beacon that somehow kept the land around the buried ship clear of dangerous—or curious—life forms. The aura had kept this near square mile untouched for centuries, even though it was surrounded on three sides by cleared farmland.

“This way,” Carl said. He approached a particularly thickly overgrown patch where the branches of one tree interlaced with the branches of the next. One massive dead oak, already beginning to crumble, still stood and was held nearly vertical by the living branches of an adjacent tree.

“What do you feel?” Jerrah asked.

“Nothing.”

They stood silent for several minutes. The sun was at the horizon now, casting an orange glow over everything and giving this section a forlorn, haunted look. There’d been birds chirping farther back and bees buzzing around the litter. But there didn’t appear to be a single insect or animal here.

They pressed on.

After a dozen yards the going became easier, the trees thinned and, as if emerging from a living wall, they found themselves in another clearing, this one nearly thirty feet across. The grass, reaching to their knees, was thick and green, except—

Carl rushed forward, thrashing through the grass. He came to a stop near the far side of the clearing. Where he stood, the grass was stunted and twisted, slightly less green than elsewhere. In the center of it was a small crater, its walls burned and baked to a solid, crystalline mass.

“My ship is under there,” Carl said flatly. He recalled that at one time the crater had been larger and deeper—the depth of a four-storey building, the ship at the bottom. But time had eroded that, though the aura from the beacon had held onto this small, blasted bit of ground to help mark its location.

“Jerrah … Melusine …you said the shipkeepers controlled all space travel, right?”

She nodded.

“Maybe your shipkeeper wants me dead so I
can’t
be used as breeding stock.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Sure it does.” Carl circled the small crater. “If I was able to breed others like me—with the sight—others who could travel through
otherspace
, your shipkeeper wouldn’t be so powerful himself, would he? He wouldn’t be the last shipkeeper. There would be other shipkeepers trained. He wouldn’t be so exalted then, would he? He wouldn’t be a one-of-a-kind any longer. Maybe they’d even retire him.”

She worked her mouth.

Ellen stepped closer. “So you think he wants you dead so he’ll control all of their … space program?”

“
Otherspace
program. Yeah, that makes sense to me,” Carl said. “I think he’s nuts. Insane, like Melusine mentioned. But it makes twisted sense. Get rid of me, the breeding stock, and he stays powerful and in control.”

“But he’s old,” Jerrah argued.

“So? He stays powerful and in charge to the last beat of his heart. And he can’t afford to take me on his ship because I don’t need the navigator’s tank to travel through
otherspace
. He wouldn’t be able to control me, to keep me boxed up with decaying muscles, force-fed nutrients and helpless. He doesn’t want any part of taking me back to Elthor. Because he can’t control me. None of them can control me.”

“He gave us no clue, and—”

“Because he’s cagey-clever,” Carl said.

“And nuts.” This from Ellen.

“Besides, why would he tell you his real plans? You might try to stop him.” He rubbed his chin. “And he has effectively stopped you, Melusine. You said you can’t contact him, nor can you return to your body.”

“My hold on this body is fading … Carl. I can’t return to my body, yet I’m having a difficult time staying here. Help me.” Jerrah dug the ball of her foot against the edge of the crater. “Can you try? To find my ship? Can you use
otherspace
to search for it? Maybe you can repair whatever is wrong. Perhaps there is something amiss with the augmentor.”

“The answer’s still I don’t know,” Carl returned. “But I intend to see if I can find
my
ship. That would be a starting point.” He stepped into the crater. “Wait for me.”

“For how long?” Ellen wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the sun; only a sliver of it remained, and it would grow dark soon.

Carl shrugged. “A million years.”

***