The Cauldron

by Jean Rabe

No nightmare this time. He just woke with a faint electrical tingle on his skin. Relaxed despite the chill, Carl opened his eyes.

  And froze as he saw that the door was open a crack, a sliver of parking lot visible beyond it. A shadowy figure bent over his suitcase on its little stand in the alcove that passed as a closet. The window curtains had been pulled back so the single naked bulb in the parking lot gave the intruder enough light to make a hasty search. As Carl watched, the thief abandoned the suitcase with a sniff and started on Carl’s pants, suspended from the clothes rod along with a couple of his shirts and a dozen empty hangers.

  Carl didn’t think he’d moved, but the man snapped upright. He turned. The dim light glinted on his fist, on his impossibly long forefinger.

  Oh, shit, Carl thought. The bastard’s got a gun.

  Very much in control, the still-shadowy figure walked to the side of the bed and he held the barrel very hard against the hollow of Carl’s temple and said something. A question. Carl sorted the meaning out from the obscenities: “Where’s your money?”

  “Wallet.”

  “And credit cards! They in there, too?” Carl’s eyes were held sideways by the gun, but he heard the grin in the voice.

  Carl could feel the figure’s muscles tense as the fingers began to squeeze the trigger. At the same time, his own muscles tensed, and an obscure corner of his mind wondered: why does this man want to kill me?

  The air was suddenly clammy. Fog swirled at the edge of his vision. Carl managed to nod silently.

  “So where the shit is it? Credit cards? Money?”

  “Pants.” The clammy coldness turned into a tingle, the same tingle he’d felt Friday night, but it was building faster this time. The fog was thickening, closing in.

  “Don’t screw with me, man. Ain’t no wallet in those pants.”

  “The shelf.” A twitch of his hand, the gesture sweeping through the fog, not touching it, not disturbing the shapes that now swam in it. “Maybe I left it on the shelf.” The tingle was becoming unbearable.

  The thief backed up, never taking his eyes off Carl, and patted along the shelf above the hangers. The hand reappeared a moment later holding the wallet. The thief grinned, several bad teeth visible even in the dim light.

  “Thanks a lot, pal, but you shouldn’t’a woke up.”

  Through the thickening fog, Carl saw the man extend his arm straight out in front of him, holding the gun as if he were at a target range. The tingle, now a raging electrical storm confined to his body, climbed toward a peak as the man’s hand clenched over the gun. Carl felt his body twisting, being twisted as the tunnel of fog collapsed in on him, blotting out everything except shapes that moved in the fog. People? He plunged helplessly into it—

  —was enveloped in icy, shimmering grayness, and then—

  The gun cracked. The muzzle flashed. But Carl wasn’t in bed. He was on his feet, half concealed behind the open door of the room. Limp with shock, he grabbed the doorknob for support as he felt the tingle begin again, saw the fog racing inward from the edges of his vision.

  The thief turned toward him. The gun swung wildly. “Holy shit!” the man breathed, his eyes leaping upward, his hand shaking as he jerked the gun up toward Carl’s chest. No buildup this time. The electrical storm within him started at its peak, the fog chilling, smothering. Carl gasped. Like a hooked fish, he was jerked violently into the fog filled with the shapes of people and was—

  —thrown out. Collapsing bonelessly to the floor on the other side of the room, Carl heard the second shot, saw the second flash.

  The thief spun, gaped at him with pop-eyed incomprehension changing to terror, stumbled backward, dropped the wallet, and rushed from the room. Outside, a car door slammed and an engine snarled.

  Still chilled to the bone, Carl managed to get to his feet. What did I just do? he asked himself. Whatever it was how did I do it? The cold was the cold of his nightmares, but—A nightmare? Was that what it had been, a nightmare, masquerading as waking up? He shivered. Had he dreamed the thief?

  Am I awake now?

  On rubbery legs he got to the light switch and flipped it on. From there, he could see the singed black hole in the pillow, the spatter of powder burns around it. Somebody pounded on the door of a nearby room. He stared at the hole.

  “Everything all right here?” A man stood in the still-open door. The night manager.

  Carl nodded toward the bed. “Guy shot at me. Burglar. Missed, thank God.”

  “Yeah?” The manager came into the room, rubbing at the two-day stubble on his chin. “A burglar? What the hell happened?”

  Carl pointed at the pillow. “I woke up and saw him going through my stuff. Guess he heard me move or something.” Feeling winded, he took a breath. “He asked where my wallet was. I told him, and he—just—shot.”

  “Shoulda had better sense than to open your eyes, pal.” The manager noticed the wallet, still on the floor where the gunman had dropped it. “Or anything else,” he said, sounding disgusted. “Better to let them get away with what they can get away with. These days, they’d as soon shoot as say good morning. You want me to call the cops?”

  Carl shook his head.

  “Okay. Wouldn’t do any good, anyways,” the manager said, sounding relieved. “Never catch him. They’re everywhere, especially in this neighborhood.” He looked at the hole in the pillow and shuddered. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch. Where’d the second shot go? I heard two.”

  “Back there,” Carl said, his finger jerking in the direction of the opposite wall. A hole had been drilled in the plasterboard just above the top of the door. The manager frowned at it. “High,” he said. After a moment Carl realized that he’d diagnosed the state of the thief.

  “No cops, and the room’s on the house,” the man said. “You want a fresh pillow?”

  “Thanks.”

  Five minutes later, with an undamaged pillow under his head and the door’s security chain fastened, Carl lay back and tried to make sense of the senseless. Friday night, he knew now, had been no dream. Everything, from Harry’s “you-don’t-exist” to Mike Fowler’s beating, had been real. He’d been through it all. ESP had nothing to do with it. He’d been in that car with Shelly … they’d been to the movies, and then he’d been in the car, and he’d escaped being crushed by that semi exactly the way he’d just escaped two bullets.

  Twice—no, three times counting the speeding car from earlier today—he had been in mortal danger. Three times he had escaped.

  But how?

  That was how he had escaped the speeding car downtown, wasn’t it? Had he simply “moved” from in front of it to behind it without going through the intervening space? Was it teleportation?

  Whatever had happened, it wasn’t his doing, not his conscious doing at any rate. Something, some deep-seated reflex, had taken over his body, like you’d snatch a hand back from a flame before it could send a message of pain to the brain. So some unknown reflex had snatched him—his entire body—out of danger.

  Someone had deliberately tried to kill him—twice—the speeding car downtown, the thief moments ago. Were they related? Was someone out to get him? Like a contracted assassin? If that was the case, they wouldn’t give up. There’d be another attempt coming. And, if there was, would he be whisked to safety again?

  The chills, the electrical tingling, the fog closing in—were they warnings that he was about to die? Like the “auras” that warned epileptics of approaching seizures? Or were they simply a prelude to whatever insane power he called up to escape? A power that made garden variety ESP seem tame and logical by comparison? A power that let him move from one place to the next in a heartbeat?

  And what made him think the power was his? Like he suddenly had some wondrous ability like a comic book superhero? Or that something otherworldly had chosen him to repeatedly save? An angel on his shoulder?

  He shuddered at the sudden image of something huge and amorphous reaching down and snatching him out of the way of d
eath the way a human might snatch a helpless kitten from the jaws of a mean dog. Something that lived in a world of icy fog and swirling, featureless manlike shapes …

  Totally senseless.

  More likely, he was indeed losing his mind.

  Attempts to kill him.

  Twenty-some years of his life vanished from records.

  The icy fog.

  He was curious and flustered, but he did not panic. No screaming, clanging panic. Why wasn’t he terrified? Why was he just intensely inquisitive? Shouldn’t he be shivering with fear?

  If I could just talk to somebody about this. Really talk to them …

  A wave of loneliness swept over him. He was alone, had always been alone. Even with Shelly, he had been alone. He never could have talked to her about this. About the nightmares, maybe, eventually, but never about this. To his mother? Would he have talked to her?

  His thoughts shied away from remembering her. He felt an ache, the same ache he’d felt looking at that picture this afternoon, and a pang of guilt. Guilt?

  Again, his thoughts veered away. If only he could talk to Shelly! But she was gone, just as …

  Just as …

  Frowning, he tried to complete the thought, but whatever it was had slipped away, too long dead to be remembered. Like the first twenty-odd years of his life. Carl lay on the bed where someone had tried to murder him, not worrying about it, not afraid the man would return, not even afraid of the fog that had saved him, thinking only about that loneliness.

  Eventually, he fell asleep.

  ***

  Chapter 15

  Navigator

  Something most unusual was happening: despite the heightened vigilance of that portion of his mind that never completely released—never dared release—its hold on otherspace, the navigator was lost in a dream.

  His dream was one sometimes granted the elderly, in which youth, however illusory, returns, however briefly. As if awake, he strolled along a white path through a blossoming field—a park?—with his favorite sister. Although she was older than he, they were adult enough to be of equal height: not long, then, before his exaltation, well before he had first embarked into otherspace.

  How beautiful she has become, he thought. Her graceful, gliding step made her seem almost to float along the white stone surface of the path. Elegance was the concept to describe her. Long, slender neck loosely encircled by the crimson ribbon of lineage, pointed chin beneath a small firm mouth, broad brow, and her lovely eyes, only a hint of their luminous gray-yellow showing through the shadowlids, translucent against a sun riding high in the pink-tinged sky.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, turning to gaze at him. “I have heard it is no easy life.”

  “But the honor!” he protested.

  “Oh, honor, yes,” his sister agreed, as if honor meant nothing. “There is honor, I will grant you that.”

  “And there are so few of our people—fewer now than ever before—who have the ability to undertake this, dear sister. I am able, and so I must. Only a scattering of us have the sight.”

  “Yes,” she said sadly. “You are One Who Sees.”

  The sun warmed his face and chest. The breeze that fluttered his sister’s crimson ribbon ruffled his own wiry curls and played with the loose fabric of his clothing. His feet pressed firmly upon the solid ground.

  I did not know, the navigator thought, half waking. He wondered idly what the woman Melusine looked like, whether her face resembled his sister’s as her liaison-filtered voice resembled that long unheard, so beloved voice. But the thought was the merest ripple on the surface of his consciousness. He sank back into the dream.

  “You are happy,” his sister said, and he ignored the question in her tone. “Or do you undertake this only out of duty … because there are so few with the sight left?”

  “The honor,” he told her again.

  He woke more fully then, and became aware of the liquid prison in which he floated, never to walk or feel a breeze again. The dream faded into a shimmering memory. He had not questioned his happiness, had not once thought in those terms, for most of a very long life. Now he lay in the liquid, eyes closed as they almost always were—even the elixir that kept the terror of water at bay was not that effective—and wondered: If I had it to do over again …

  The liaison awaited his words. He had none. He should report those odd thoughts to the shipkeeper, should let the shipkeeper try to define their source and extirpate it. Instead, the old man hugged the memory of his sister walking in the red-gold sunlight to himself, hugged it and cherished it silently until, abruptly, it was driven from his thoughts by a burst of energy in otherspace so concentrated and intense it made not just his mind but his entire body pulse in response.

  In that instant, a thousand cycles of conditioning focused his entire mind on otherspace.

  And he saw it. Not the burst of energy, which had lasted less than a heartbeat, but the imprint that it had left behind. It was deep within the world’s otherspace halo, in all likelihood on the world’s surface. And tiny. But so intense! Even now the imprint blazed like a pinpoint beacon, and—

  A second flare! From nearly the same location, this one as intense as if the entire transition energy of a ship had been concentrated in a hundredth of the area! No one, no one had such power, not even the legendary Delphoros, who’d been lost so long ago. Unless Delphoros had become stronger.

  The navigator waited patiently, but the flare did not come again. As if his senses had been rejuvenated by energy from the flares, another imprint, this one not a single spot but a trail of some length, pulsed brightly for a moment, attracting the navigator’s attention. Caused by the same being, in another time and another place? Or was it a different signature?

  For a long moment, he studied that thin trail, resisting the implications, repelled by the thought of betraying a being he had, until this moment, believed to be only a legend. Delphoros, like him, was a navigator. Was this truly Delphoros on the world below?

  Melusine had shared some of the reports on the legendary navigator: that he believed the living ships they all flew on to be fellow creatures with a right to their own destinies rather than animals to be exploited because they could travel through otherspace.

  Delphoros had contended that the shapes in otherspace were also creatures, and that traveling through otherspace might disrupt them. Despite Delphoros’s beliefs, he had navigated—though there were rumors he was more forced into the ranks rather than recruited. Had there been an abundance of navigators, one as pacifistic—no, pathetic—as Delphoros would have been overlooked. But there weren’t enough navigators then, practically none left now. In fact, only two left working now, himself and a navigator belonging to the enemy.

  But Delphoros could revitalize Elthor’s navigators. He could be bred, and his power and abilities passed to future generations. Delphoros, if he truly lived on the world below, had to be retrieved.

  The navigator wondered what Delphoros’s missions had been that sent him through otherspace to this part of the universe. Perhaps it was in the records Melusine had studied. Certainly it was no longer important, so many years passed. And there were records she was not privy to …

  What had caused the ship to crash? And how could Delphoros have escaped the confines of the nutrient tank to travel on the world below? He could not have survived in the tank for this long.

  He had to be traveling outside of it.

  Ah, to be outside a tank.

  Dismissing his musings, which the navigator considered irrelevant to his task, he reached out to the liaison to make his report.

  ***

  Chapter 16

  Melusine

  At last! Melusine exulted.

  She forced herself to be calm, lest she betray her presence to the host she just slipped into. But it was difficult to contain her excitement. For more than two cycles, with only brief, necessary respites in a rejuvenation pod, she had been striving toward this goal: access, not just to the s
enses, but to the innermost thoughts of a host. This one was the familiar female she had discovered earlier, the one who smoked strange things that muddled her senses.

  At last, suddenly and without warning, she had felt the very shape of the woman’s mind shift, letting her settle into a niche that fit as closely and certainly as any restrainment pod.

  Sounds, seemingly coming from massive, moving images projected onto the far wall of the near-darkened room her host sat in, suddenly became words, words that her host—and now she—recognized and understood.

  A movie … her host thought something about a movie.

  Melusine listened, puzzled by the sense behind the words. Within moments the words ceased. The images on the large wall, of two beings similar to the one she now inhabited, pressed their naked bodies against each other and—

  The world jumped.

  Melusine tightened her mental grip on her host, afraid she had become aware of her presence and was trying to break free—and with that very action made her aware. Her entire body quivered and stiffened, her attention suddenly diverted from the moving images. Her glance darted from side to side.

  The world swayed. A voice shouted silently in her mind: Melusine!

  Her host twisted in the seat to scan the other beings scattered throughout the room. She felt a prickling sensation: water, polluted water, emerged from his skin!

  Melusine! the voice came again. The shipkeeper! The voice was coming not from around her host, but from inside the ship. She was being called back!

  Filled with regret, she released her hold on the host. The room, the moving images, everything disappeared in an instant, to be replaced by the gray translucence of the restrainment pod. Even before the pod began its retreat, she could feel the augmentor’s countless tendrils reluctantly withdrawing from her scalp.

  The shipkeeper, hands deep into the liaison glow, turned his head to look at her as the pod slithered downward. “Look!” he said, returning his attention to the liaison. “He exists! The Bright One exists! The navigator found his energy.”

  For an instant, the words were alien and unrecognizable, as if her brief experience of that other language had robbed her of her own language.