The Cauldron (25 page)

Chapter 41

Delphoros

For the first time—the first time that he could clearly remember—he made a conscious effort to look around
otherspace
. Not just with his eyes, for he realized that he wasn’t even sure that it was his eyes through which he received his impressions of this realm. Or if, in this unknown dimension, he even possessed eyes. He had the eerie feeling that, in the transition, he developed other organs which sensed his surroundings here, but that his mind—unable to cope with their outputs directly—translated them into more acceptable forms.

Forms that would, in real space, have been perceived by his eyes.

Below him, he could see no solidity, and the distant vortices that perhaps were the phantom images of giant suns could be seen with equally fuzzy clarity in all directions. He could feel nothing but the seemingly stippled wind that swept around him. And he wondered if he, himself, was any more solid than the gray around him, any more substantial than the forms that hovered, unfocussed, everywhere

As he floated there in the endless gray, a feeling of helplessness intruded
. I don’t know how I enter and leave otherspace. I just do it. How?

For an instant, the feeling of helplessness blossomed into panic, and the gray began to fade toward black. An overwhelming sense of vertigo spun his consciousness like a pinwheel, and he felt as if his very being was draining away, being scattered into the whirling, disappearing grayness. He tried to grasp the shapes that spun through his senses, but he had nothing with which to grasp them. He tried to scream, to shout, but the growing darkness swallowed the sound—or the mere thought of the sound—without a trace. He felt it closing around him, muffling, and suffocating him.

The icy chill gathered itself tightly around every scattered, imaginary cell of his body.

It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter that I don’t know how I come here or how I leave or how I am able to move. It only matters that I can do it.

Slowly the black receded and the grayness of
otherspace
returned.

He searched.

As each shape approached him, he reached out to it with whatever senses he possessed. Some shapes retreated, darting away, merging with others in the distance, reappearing only to retreat again.

But one came closer and closer.

As did another.

And another.

The shapes were not illusions, nor his mind playing tricks. They existed, somewhere here in their own reality of
otherspace
, or in another reality, another universe that lay beyond
otherspace
.

They existed, and they were communicating … thoughts, images, feelings … reached out to him, touched him, triggered his own long-buried memories of other realities, of other dreams.

One shape stood out above all the others.

Tycho. By concentrating and clearing his mind, he could understand the shadows’ whispers as words in a variety of languages.

“Thank you,” Tycho said in Danish. “For teaching me about the stars. I finally discovered what this—dark matter—is.”

Carl/Delphoros studied the shadow. “You were
my
teacher,” he returned in Danish.

“Never,” Tycho said. “It was always I who learned from you. Perhaps you just never realized that.”

Freida was there, too, as well as Forlorn Frank, some of the dogs he used to clean up after, a soldier he’d shared a trench with in WWI, and a Roman gladiator he’d been friends with. They floated beyond Tycho.

“I find myself thinking about you from time to time,” Delphoros said. He peered through the shapes. Was Shelly here? For a moment he thought he recognized her form. “I relive our sessions in my dreams, Tycho. They are so vivid I can feel the stone floor against my bare feet.”

“I hope they are fond thoughts you hold,” Tycho said.

Delphoros nodded, and then said, “Always. Only good thoughts,” in case the spirit could not detect the motion of his bobbing head.

“I’ve … we’ve … been trying to reach you,” Tycho continued. “We would sense you here, but always you were gone before—”

“I had not wholly understood then,” Delphoros said. “Perhaps I still don’t. That—”

“That dark matter is the essence of life,” Tycho finished. “You understand well enough. It was my one wish … to discover its nature. I achieved that with my death.”

“Would you call this …” Delphoros searched for a word. “heaven?”

The spirit remained silent for a time, its shape leaning to one side as if it pondered something. Behind it the other spirits continued their hushed conversations.

“All souls come here,” Tycho finally said. “Good and tainted, heroes and miscreants. This is the other side of life.”

Otherspace
, Delphoros whispered.

“I cannot say if there is something beyond this,” the Dane continued. “But I would hope so.”

“The other side of death. Because even spirits die,” Delphoros finished, and that he had contributed to those deaths clawed at his heart.

“Yes, even spirits die,” Tycho echoed.

“When will you join us?” This from the WWI soldier.

In a million years
, Delphoros thought again. He didn’t give them an answer.

More shapes had appeared in the passing moments, some familiar, but most of them not. There was the outline of a young Egyptian boy; Delphoros could not remember his name, but he recalled that he looked after him once.

How far back did his lives lead?

“I have tasks,” he told Tycho.

“The ship that hovers in this place and feasts—”

“Yes, that ship and the dead one below. I must see to them.” Then he willed himself away, focusing on an image and an imagined direction and trusting that this would work and not strand him in hard-packed earth. He’d likely join all these souls in
otherspace
for good in that event. He felt the fog shifting and a bolt of coldest-cold went through him.

Then he was in utter darkness.

His ship.

Delphoros had not thought to bring a flashlight; perhaps he wasn’t such an advanced being after all. A rare smile played at the corner of his lip. The place had the feeling of a tomb, pitch dark and fusty, the air thin and laced heavy with dust, silt under his bare feet. He heard the shushing sound of the silt as he shuffled around and bumped into various things.

This indeed had been his ship, at the same time his companion and his prison. He and his small crew had traversed galaxies in it, going so impossibly fast, fast, fast through
otherspace
. At that time Delphoros thought he was necessary to Elthor’s quest to explore the farthest reaches, that he was one of only a few with the gift of sight—One Who Sees—and who could pilot through the dark matter. It had taken him more than a handful of such voyages before he realized all of the truths … and it had taken how many centuries for him to recapture his true name and memories? … that he didn’t need the tank. The tank was a cell meant to hold him, the nutrients and surgeries vehicles to control him. He was a puppet then, powerful, but a puppet nonetheless. All the navigators were.

How could a race as advanced as the Elthorans hold its navigators thusly?

He shook his head when a rush of memories came at him: Roman slaves, Coolie railroad workers, WWII death camps; all societies had it in them to subjugate others.

When he’d discovered the truths about
otherspace
, so disturbing that his mind had buried all the pieces until his meeting with Tycho minutes ago, he had decided to crash his ship. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life—because it meant killing the crew and the living ship, and himself; he believed he would die in the doing. And it was harder still because the shipkeeper controlled him, with the nutrients that made his incredible mind so malleable. It had taken every measure of determination to break the control, and he’d only managed it while the ship was in
otherspace
. There the shipkeeper was the most vulnerable.

He’d set a course to crash on this world, as it was the closest, pulling the ship through
otherspace
, and knowing full well what was happening to the spirits as he fulfilled his dark plan.

Delphoros bumped into a shattered control panel and his feet crunched over something hard—bones?—interrupting his recollection He continued to stumble around in the pitch, finding the dead augmentor, the shipkeeper’s chair, and finally coming to the navigator’s tank. It had split like an egg from the impact of the crash. He remembered the painful, jarring sensation.

The memory was so real his chest started heaving as he fought for breath. The nutrients had spilled during the crash, leaving his naked form exposed to air he couldn’t breathe. But as he lay there dying, he
did
start to breathe. His surgically-altered lungs found a way to accept small quantities of oxygen.

He’d rested in the remains of the tank for days, unable to move, watching as the lights dimmed and the living ship died around him. He’d heard no movements, and so he knew he’d killed the crew. And though he was confident he would join them soon, he continued to live.

When feeling slowly crept back into his limbs, he’d twitch the muscles in exploration of sensation. His stomach burned from hunger, but the nutrients were gone, and he had no way to feed himself. He flopped about on the floor like a fish thrown on the bank of a river until—eventually—he was able to stand by pulling himself up on a broken counter. His feet bled from the shards of the broken tank.

His heart pounded from fear and the revelations of killing the ship and crew. His stomach growled in protest of being empty. Delphoros found no way out of the ship; it had been cocooned by the earth it had slammed into.

But he found a way out through
otherspace
.

It was the first time he had traveled there without a tank and ship, and he was exhilarated by the icy cold sensation that cloaked him. He saw the shapes then, as he had on his previous voyages, and knew they were souls. He did not know he could communicate with them, or that they were trying to reach out. He was merely “passing through” and within minutes found himself on the ground near where the ship had buried itself, a large blasted crater to mark its passing.

The events of how he had come to be here, and what he had done—murder, going against the Elthoran service—were so egregious that he thrust them away, buried them like he’d buried the ship and its crew.

And he started the first of his many, many lives on this earth.

He remembered running with primitive people who hunted buffalos—though he could never bring himself to actually kill one of the large beasts. He worked on a massive stone wall in China, groomed horses for British Parliament members, herded sheep in the mountains, and became a vintner in France. All the time he stayed in the background, always the helper, the worker, never anyone who would rise to prominence and become well known.

Never wanting to draw attention to himself.

There were so many pieces of so many lives, he could not take it all in, instead relishing fragments that seemed to mean the most.

In Ancient Egypt, he mentored a boy, not one of royalty, but the eldest son of one of the pyramid architects. Delphoros taught him the doctrine of eternal life as it was written in the XVIIIth Dynasty.

“In the Papyrus of Ani,” Delphoros told the boy in the memory, “the deceased is seen as having arrived at a place that is far away and remote. Here there is neither air to breathe nor water to drink. But he is not thirsty. Here he asks a question: ‘How long have I to live?” The great god Annu answers:
auk er heh en heh aha en heh
.”

It was the same hieroglyphics Carl Johnson had on the print on the top shelf of his bookcase, the one Shelly had asked him about.

He pictured Shelly, standing by the case and pointing: “I’ve been meaning to ask you, but I keep forgetting. The hieroglyphs. What do they say? Do you know?”

He’d answered: “Somebody told me once, probably where I bought it. Something something something
heh aha
something.”

In his older memory, Delphoros repeated the phrase to the boy: “
Auk er heh en heh aha en heh.
” Thou shalt exist for millions of millions of years.

Delphoros worked his way around to where he remembered the control panel being and fumbled until his fingers located the only thing that still functioned on the long-dead ship: the beacon that continued to send out a pulse, asking for a rescue. He ripped it from the console and held it, turning it one way, then another until he found a way to disable it.

Then he stretched his mind into
otherspace
once more.

***

Chapter 42

He looked for pieces in the gray, searching.

Searching.

Finally finding a door, metallic and solid, then a wall. Then a bank of controls and then … the shipkeeper. He’d found Melusine’s ship.

The shipkeeper was unaware.

Dressed in a solid shimmering gray that imitated
otherspace
itself, he stood by the controls. He was touching the controls, shifting their positions rapidly, nervously, unable to get them to work because the ship hovered in
otherpace
—a navigator’s domain.

“I would offer you a peaceful solution.” Delphoros stood next to the navigator’s tank and looked across it to the shipkeeper. He’d taken the shipkeeper by surprise, traveling here through
otherspace
, his consciousness touching that of the navigator’s and explaining his plan.

The shipkeeper came forward so fast he lost his balance and grabbed at the arms to steady himself. He turned. “The Bright One. Delphoros.”

“I prefer Carl Johnson. That’s what I’m going by in this lifetime.” He studied the shipkeeper: tall, a face all sharp corners, arms long and wrist bones protruding. He looked gaunt, reminding Carl of himself. But where Carl considered himself skinny, he considered the shipkeeper skeletal. He looked old, though not so ancient as the near-colorless navigator in the tank. Carl glanced through the viewer and saw the emaciated navigator surrounded by the nutrient fluid. Then he returned his attention to the shipkeeper.

“You’ve been trying to kill me.”

The shipkeeper squared his shoulders and felt for something at his hip, perhaps a weapon, but there was nothing. He clasped his hands in front of him and laced the fingers. “You needed to be woken. You had forgotten yourself. You thought you were human.”

“Congratulations. I have indeed woken up. Why did you try to kill me?”

The shipkeeper shook his head and opened his mouth as if to decry the notion.

But Carl held up a finger and shook it like he was scolding a child. “Why did you try to kill me?”

The shipkeeper’s lips became a thin line and his brow furrowed. Carl waited. In the silence between he heard the comforting thrum of the engine, the living ship’s heart. His feet still bare, he felt a slight constant tremor through the floor and wondered if that was normal.

“You are too powerful,” the shipkeeper said finally. “Too dangerous. For the good of Elthor and for the good of the world below—”

“It’s called Earth.”

“For the good of Earth, I took it upon myself to—”

“—kill me. Or, rather, try to. Apparently I’m not easy to kill. You did kill the Alzur ship, though, I learned of that in
otherspace
. The ship, its crew, its navigator.” Carl continued to study him, risking little glances to his sides to take in the rest of the control room. It was achingly similar to his own ship that lay buried deep in the ground. Though there were perhaps centuries between the “models” the ship-creatures had remained constant in shape. There were differences: the location of the control panel and the navigator’s tank. He inhaled sharply when he saw the body of a woman under what he suspected was the counter for the augmentor.

“Melusine,” the shipkeeper said.

“Was she too powerful?” That explained why Melusine could not return to her body or communicate with the ship. She looked young, and given everything else that had happened Carl suspected the shipkeeper had been the one who killed her. Even the navigator suspended in his tank had suspected something wrong. In the brief time Carl had shared consciousnesses while passing through
otherspace
to reach here he was overwhelmed by the suspicions and questions swirling in the navigator’s mind.

How the dead Melusine had managed to keep the essence of herself inside of Jerrah was at the same time bewildering and amazing, though he guessed her hold was indeed tenuous. “Did she, Melusine … did she try to stop you from killing me?”

“Melusine did not understand me,” the shipkeeper said.

“Actually, I don’t think you understand.” Carl ran a hand through his hair and came away with silt from the ship that was buried in the earth. “When this started a handful of days ago I thought I might be going mad. But you’re already there. You’re just … nuts.”

The shipkeeper tipped his head to the side, not understanding.

“Insane.”

“No, I am—”

“Mad.” Carl’s eyes widened. “You’re power-hungry. I bet you’re the most powerful Elthoran because of your position. You’re a shipkeeper, a pilot to the stars, and right now you command the only navigator. That makes you pretty important.”

“I am revered.”

“If you brought me back to Elthor—”

“I would be honored and rewarded for completing the mission.”

“If Elthor is still there,” Carl said. “A long, long time has passed since I—and I believe you—left the home world.
Otherspace
distorts time, doesn’t it? I’ve been away centuries, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.” He plowed ahead. “For the sake of argument, let’s say that you’re rewarded, called a hero. It wouldn’t last, your adulation, would it? They’d use me for breeding stock or clone me or find some way to produce navigators again. Or, failing that, I’d still be a navigator and another shipkeeper would be assigned to me.” He took a few steps around the tank so that it was at his back now. He felt the cool lines of the prison with his fingers. “You wouldn’t be the only shipkeeper. You wouldn’t be so powerful anymore. You’d have to share the accolades.”

The shipkeeper started to say something.

“In short, you’re nuts.”

“No more than—”

“Do you understand the nature of
otherspace
?” Carl could tell the question caught the shipkeeper off guard.

“It is dark matter.” The answer did not come immediately.

“And do you understand the nature of dark matter?”

The shipkeeper took a few steps back from the console, putting more distance between he and Carl. He turned so that if Carl wanted to keep focused on him, Melusine’s body would no longer be in the line of sight.

“The navigators are told that
otherspace
, or the space between star systems, allows for fast travel and—”

“There is nothing fast about it,” Carl cut back. “
Otherspace
distorts time, remember. Oh, I suppose some voyages are shorter, the luck of the draw they call it on Earth. But others … like mine and the one you took to find me … distorts time. You just don’t realize the time passing because
otherspace
rejuvenates you. It’s like swimming in the Fountain of Youth.”

The shipkeeper’s face was emotionless.

“Don’t you realize what
otherspace
is?” Carl let out a huffing breath that made the shipkeeper jump. “It’s souls. It’s where the non-corporeal portion of a person’s mind—his soul, for want of a better word—is transported after his body dies. The shapes that I see, that navigators see—” One Who Sees came into Carl’s thoughts. “Are the manifestations of the souls.”

“That is interesting,” the shipkeeper observed. “But I—”

“And these ships feast on them. These ships live, keeper. Haven’t you ever wondered what they eat? It is how the ships get energy to pull themselves through
otherspace
. Like fish gorge themselves on minnows, these ships devour souls. Inhale them by the thousands upon thousands every time they enter
otherspace
. And it ends here.”

Carl closed his eyes and felt the chill of
otherspace
wrap around him, numbing him. In a heartbeat he’d taken this ship out of
otherspace
and into time-and-space, from his reckoning beyond Pluto’s orbit.

The shipkeeper’s eyes were saucers. “Without a tank and—”

“The tank only controls the navigators,” Carl said. “A navigator doesn’t need the tank.”

“Navigator!” the shipkeeper hollered. The light had stopped flashing above the navigator’s tank, indicating he no longer wanted to converse with the shipkeeper. “Navigator. Take us—”

“Nowhere. You’re coming with me.” Once more the cold of
otherspace
swallowed Carl. This time he took the shipkeeper with him.

The shipkeeper tried to scream, but the sound was garbled and unrecognizable. He held the shipkeeper close, reached down and grabbed his slippers, and then released him. Then there was only one more shape among the countless others that already filled the grayness. The shipkeeper drifted.

Moments later Carl was back in the ship, using the liaison to talk to the navigator. “My plan was successful,” he said. “Your shipkeeper is marooned in
otherspace
, and soon his soul will join the shadows. “But this ship cannot return to
otherspace
. It is done feasting. You cannot take it back there, and—”

Carl listened for several minutes. “If that is your wish,” he said. Then he opened the tank and dipped his hands into the viscous nutrient fluid, touching the near-colorless skin of the navigator inside.

Then they were gone to
otherspace
.

He left the ship floating at the edge of the system, knowing the scant crew would eventually discover that the shipkeeper and navigator were gone … and that they no longer could enter
otherspace
. Perhaps one of them could pilot the ship back to Elthor.

And perhaps they would reach what remained of the home world in their lifetimes. If not, the ship still lived. It might have a destination in mind. The threat to
otherspace
was ended.

***