The Cauldron

by Jean Rabe

  In the dream/memory the rain was coming harder now, rat-a-tat-tatting like machinegun fire against the hood of his pickup. So fast and thick like a curtain, this downpour. He leaned forward, chin over the top of the steering wheel, fingers so tight on it his knuckles had gone white, eyes narrowed to find the road through the water and the fog. The fog … it didn’t make sense that there would be fog in a storm like this, not in the early summer with the temperature hovering in the high seventies, kissing eighty.

  They’d sit in Oscar’s garage on vinyl lawn chairs until the rain eased up just a bit, talking and drinking orange soda. Then he’d hitch that wood boat and trailer up to the pickup and happily go home.

  Maybe he should have waited this storm out, but he worried that Oscar would change his mind about the boat or the price, and once Carl/John had a notion in his head it festered there.

  There was water all around him now, the memory fast forwarding. He was on the banks of the river, water sloshing around his ankles. The rain … it had rained not only today, but in the two previous days as well, swelling the river and drenching the crops, making a neighbor’s bean field look like a rice paddy. Oscar’d kept the boat on its trailer under a tree near the river. The river had risen to surround the trunk, and the men joked that in a little while they wouldn’t need the trailer, the boat would be floating and Carl/John could motor it along to the resort. The motor would be extra, though, only forty dollars—practically a steal for the horsepower and condition.

  Then Oscar slipped when he stepped to the back of the boat to show Carl/John something about the motor. Oscar let out a “whoop,” cursed, and started flailing as he was swept past the tree and out into the river.

  Carl/John didn’t hesitate, though anxiety tugged at his gut with each step. He waded out, arms stretched far, water around his waist now, fingers brushing Oscar’s before the men were pulled apart and pulled under. Carl/John took in a mouthful of river water and tried to spit it out but only managed to suck in more. His clothes were lead, pulling him down, the undercurrent grabbing at him, and no matter how hard he kicked he wasn’t rising toward the surface. Instead, he sank faster, his chest tightening as his lungs starved for oxygen.

  Dying, drowning—just like Ellen had said when she sat across from him at her little kitchen table. His fingers were curled around the coffee mug, just like the tendrils of fog were curling around the legs and arms of the sinking John Miller. The gray of the water became the gray of the fog, which persistently tugged at him.

  Don’t fight it, Carl thought. Don’t fight anything about this dream, this horrid memory.

  The fog thickened and filled his lungs. He floated on it now, the tendrils buoying him to the surface. Except it wasn’t the surface of the river, it was some place or force quite alien. The fog—or whatever it was that masked itself as fog—continued to pull him, through space and time, depositing John Miller into the life of Carl Johnson, and into a cubicle.

  O O O

  “Rush job,” Harry said. “Terrel Systems is swamped with the stuff they’re doing for some new Air Force program, so they’re farming out a lot of their industrial manuals, most of which are due day before yesterday. Which means if we turn this one around fast, there’s a good chance they’ll be sending us a lot more.”

  Fragments of other memories came at him, falling down like specks of pepper from a shaker.

  O O O

  Shelly will you marry me?

  O O O

  “And that marine radio pamphlet you did Monday—” Harry leaned back with his arms behind his head. “Marston called this morning and chewed me a new one. Said there were damn near as many typos as there were words. And a few downright goofs in the technical stuff, Carl. We can’t afford that.”

  O O O

  Shelly will you marry me?

  O O O

  Grabbing a bottle of 7-UP, Carl slammed the refrigerator door shut and pulled the opener from its magnetic mooring near the top of the door. The cap came loose with an unusually loud warning hiss, and he was just able to get the bottle to his lips to catch the fizz before it spilled over.

  O O O

  Shelly will you …

  O O O

  They piled into Shelly’s old Chevy and took off. The inexplicable queasy/pleasant feeling lasted the whole thirty-mile drive to Creighton, even through a hurried meal at a Wendy’s a few blocks from the Golden Oldies theater. He felt a schizophrenic mixture of happiness and apprehension as he sank into one of the theater’s red plush seats and inhaled the scents of the place: the buttered popcorn that wafted from a couple a few rows behind them, the musty-fusty funk of the cavernous room, faintly some cleaning product that had been used on the carpet, and roses—that would be Shelly’s perfume.

  Shelly …

  The movie finished, he stared at the windshield, at the wipers sweeping back and forth. He tried to scream at Shelly, Be careful! But nothing came out. The sounds he desperately wanted to make were sucked into the fog, the gray swirling mist that was now a tunnel with billowing walls collapsing in on him. But he was in a car. Shelly was driving—Slow down! Slow down!

  Bad curve. A wall of trees rushed through the fog. The car lunged as she tried to follow the curve and stay on her side of the double yellow line.

  Lights swept across Carl’s eyes. Around the curve came a huge semi, hogging the middle of the road. Shelly screamed and jammed on the brakes.

  “Wake up, Carl!”

  Her car headed straight for the monstrous semi.

  The wheels locked and he felt the traction break, felt the car skid, felt the tingling ache become an explosion of pain as the gleaming chrome bumper of the truck rode up the hood of Shelly’s old car and he was pitched headlong into the cold gray fog.

  O O O

  The fog had saved John Miller from drowning.

  It had saved Carl Johnson from a fatal car accident.

  How many other times had it saved him? How many times had he used the dreamtime … he put a name to the fog now … to escape death?

  How many other lives—and “deaths” or almost-deaths—had he experienced? How many times had one life faded and another grown in its place?

  It seemed the fog created a new life, that the pain and disorientation from a death was not permanent. But it was a permanent loss for the people he left behind, like Ellen when he had been John Miller. And while the fog had apparently wiped his memory clean of his previous life, it had not wiped her memory; she still grieved for her drowned husband.

  Slowly, as if pulling himself from a sucking pit of quicksand, Carl—John—whoever he truly was dragged himself out of the morass of pain and fleeting memory. Even as he opened his mind further, letting the present in once again, his newly recovered past still clung to him with its bloody claws.

  Who was he?

  He had been Ellen’s husband, he knew that for certain.

  He also had been …

  ***

  Chapter 24

  Navigator

  The navigator tried to imagine what it would be like to be deposited on an alien world, cut off from everyone you knew, like had happened with Delphoros. Would it be any different than his own fate, tied to a tank and only able to see another when they looked in through a small viewport?

  And would Delphoros welcome the tank again?

  The navigator knew that while Elthor desperately needed Delphoros, they could not allow him to spread his radical ideas to others. If Delphoros’ beliefs—protests against using the living ships—became canon, otherspace exploration, which allowed for travel far faster than the speed of light, could halt. There was no other choice: Delphoros had to be tightly controlled upon his return to Elthor, a tank greater than this one built, and strong drugs used to further keep him in check.

  If there were other navigators, Delphoros would be left to rot on the planet below. But now the need for Delphoros had eclipsed the danger of his words and ideas. None of the children born on Elthor in recent memory had an otherspa
ce gift.

  They had to retrieve this one.

  Melusine had to coax him back with words or outright capture him.

  The Elthoran council would force Delphoros to change his thinking, using whatever medical means necessary. The navigator thought they should have done that more than a century back … reeducate him … perhaps he would not have run. No matter, he would never run again. Perhaps they would cut off his limbs.

  The return of Delphoros would give them new life in otherspace.

  The navigator was almost excited at the prospect. A shudder passed through the navigator. He and the shipkeeper had discussed the possibility of their being two beings below with the sight when he detected the second flash in otherspace. There had been a second flash, he was sure of it, but the navigator could not tell for certain if it was the same pattern—Delphoros stepping into otherspace twice. But the more the navigator studied the patterns, and the more he thought about it, the more he believed it was two distinct beings. Gaining two individuals with the ability to traverse otherspace could be a nearly impossible feat. But if it could be managed, what a boon!

  Two. Could there really be two below? Delphoros … and another?

  In the past few days the navigator had detected two more flashes of the same pattern as the first using otherspace. Why? How? To move from one place to the next, or one life to the next? No more of the second pattern in that timeframe. But he had detected it in the world’s history.

  From what Melusine had told them of her research, the Bright One’s life seemed to extend back at least three hundred years, and Delphoros had been gone from Elthor less than half that time. Confusing. Unsettling. Puzzling above all else.

  Could the second pattern be from a native of the world below, one with the unwitting power to see into otherspace? The native older than Delphoros? Could that native be recruited as a navigator? Yes. Forced, if necessary, to come to Elthor for formal training. Reeducated just like Delphoros would be. Perhaps in the centuries to come others might be found here, or the offspring of either could be culled.

  Perhaps this world could be harvested for potential navigators.

  Melusine would need to gain both targets soon to keep them from the Alzur.

  And if she was successful, they would return to Elthor and he could see his sister.

  His sister’s eyes were a luminous gray-yellow that glimmered brightly through shadowlids. He missed her terribly.

  “Are you sure?” He recalled once again her asking him that the day he’d agreed to become a navigator. “Are you sure? I have heard it is no easy life.”

  The hardship is nothing when such honor is concerned, he had returned.

  “There is honor, I will grant you that,” she had said.

  He could remember his sister’s words exactly, but he could no longer conjure up the sound of her voice. Despite his considerable imagination, the tones had escaped him.

  He was so very old, and his sister was a trace older.

  Did she still live?

  And, if so, would she have the strength to help hold him up when he at last returned to Elthor and was freed to touch the ground?

  His mission intruded once more and his sister’s face faded.

  “Do not let us fail, Melusine,” he breathed. He did not want the elders to direct this ship elsewhere in search of another creature that might be in tune with otherspace. They had no other leads for navigators. Such a search could go on more years than the navigator had left.

  If he died on this ship, the shipkeeper and Melusine would be stranded with his corpse.

  The navigator had charted their course through otherspace and then the stars on the far side, not by seeing his ship’s path, but by feeling it. He could see only the dome cover of his tank, and sometimes through a small window, the face of the shipkeeper come to check on him.

  He tried to remember seeing his own face mirrored in the surface of a puddle of rainwater from his youth. The image was elusive. He brushed off the notion of trying to recapture his likeness the way a man might bat cobwebs out of his path. So old, his face would have changed anyway. Perhaps weathered with wrinkles and bleached by the liquid of the tank. Emaciated, most likely, all bony angles.

  Perhaps he did not want to see himself after all.

  Would his sister shrink from him?

  Would it be better if he died out of her sight?

  And yet, he did not want to perish here, in this tank, especially not so far from home orbiting a world he could never truly see or touch.

  How much life did he have remaining?

  And how much more of this utter loneliness could he endure? Despite being in the company of Melusine and the shipkeeper, it was a solitary existence he had enthusiastically, and perhaps in his scant years foolishly, embraced.

  An honor it was, to be chosen as a navigator. Blessed to have a mind able to link to otherspace, let alone to chart a path through it. He was a rare individual, regaled by his family when he embarked on the training, enshrined by his society.

  And entombed by his eager acceptance of what he’d thought was his destined fate.

  It took a good measure of his mind to focus and prevent himself from tumbling into madness. But was a piece of himself already there?

  “Melusine,” he called to her through the liaison.

  While he waited for her to respond, he listened to the ship. Without the liaison he could hear only his heart, and sometimes, when he concentrated, the lap of the liquid against his body. He could hear the shipkeeper whenever he came near the tank, but rarely could he hear Melusine. She moved so quietly. Occasionally the barely audible swish of the fabric of her tunic gave her away.

  As it did now.

  But that was because she had engaged the liaison, and through it he could hear well beyond his tank.

  “Navigator,” she said.

  “How is your progress, Melusine?”

  ***

  Chapter 25

  Carl Johnson

  He had been Albert Johansen in 1916. Through the pale fog that blanketed the countryside he made out the name of a village on a cracked and precariously-tilting signpost: Ginchy. He picked his way across uneven ground on the outskirts. Wounded British soldiers lay on stretchers around him. They were waiting to be evacuated by a horse-drawn ambulance that trundled down a narrow road in their direction. There were too many wounded; the ambulance could not carry them all. He was escorting a nurse from stretcher to stretcher, a young woman who was as beautiful as this scarred landscape was ugly. He asked her if she would go out with him when the fighting was done, and in a lilting British accent she accepted.

  Was he British, too? He couldn’t recall. He was in one of their uniforms, though it was tattered and spotted with blood.

  In the distance he saw a bomb-blasted stretch of field dotted with shattered trees. He heard the moans of the conscious, smelled their blood and the tang of waste; some had soiled themselves. The clop of the approaching horses’ hooves grew louder, the chatter of medics, more moans, then gunshots and the thunder of explosives.

  They weren’t safe here. The enemy was coming.

  The enemy would overrun this place, and there were not enough soldiers left standing to fight them off. Ammunition was low, support wouldn’t arrive in time.

  There was only the one ambulance. Not enough nurses. He held her hand; it was cool and smooth and covered with the blood of soldiers.

  Albert Johansen would somehow survive this battle, and he would go out with the nurse.

  But he could not recall what happened after that.

  O O O

  Elijah Johns heard the news in the spring of 1848 about gold being found in the American River. He became part of the stampede out West, abandoning his masonry trade in Pennsylvania, catching Gold Fever. He arrived just as the two newspapers in Yerba Buena (later to be called San Francisco) folded … their staffs heading into the mountains to pan the streams. The populations in many of the coastal towns were dwindling as amateur
prospectors struck out to find their fortunes. Elijah had left a wife behind, promising to return with sacks of money, risking everything on this gamble to give them a good life.

  He hired a team of ox to carry his baggage and equipment to a place named Hangtown, passing Sutters Fort and pausing to stare at a collection of mostly-empty buildings around which cattle and mules grazed. He marveled at the canopy of stars at night, cooked his own food, and slept without fear. Green at mining, he pitched his tent along the bank of a stream that cut through a ravine, and took his pan to the water, watching a few others nearby so he could copy their technique and take a turn at the trough. Practice and observation yielded a handful of shining nuggets after several days. The weight felt good in his pocket.

  Elijah naively had not expected to find so much sin amid all the promise of wealth. The language was foul; many of the miners gambled and drank, stole from each other, and some even murdered. On a trip into town he watched a man lose a thousand dollars in the span of a few hours at a poker table. Elijah opened a bank account so he could scrupulously save his money until the time he decided he’d earned enough and could return to his wife. He was on his way to the bank one early morning when he was jumped and dragged into an alley, beat and robbed, and left for dead. He managed to hang on, and his wife—looking nearly like the battlefield nurse from the war—made the train trip out here.

  O O O

  Shortly before 1800 two wagon-roads cut across the Alleghany Mountains, the one he took leading from the Potomac to the Mohnongahela. The Indians had been chased to the Cuyahoga River, and so he felt safe to join with others building cabins on the site of what would be called Cleveland. He worked tirelessly cutting wood until he fell sick that winter, sweating fiercely and shaking beneath what alternately were too many and too few blankets. Despite broth and rest he and a handful of other men and women—including one who he intended to marry—grew weaker and weaker … until the fog came.