The Cauldron

by Jean Rabe

  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.

  ***

  Chapter 43

  Carl Johnson

  They were in Evergreen back at Ellen’s resort, one of the cabins that had not been touched by either the brunt of the storm or the ship’s weapons. They’d nearly picked Sunset, the largest of the cabins, but Evergreen was closer to the lake, and Carl was not afraid of the water. In truth, they could have had their choice of any of Ellen’s cabins: all the guests had fled after what the news stations reported as “multiple deadly lightning strikes.”

  Carl told Ellen about otherspace. Everything, as if he were reading her the highlights from the evening paper. Even as he listened to himself speak, though, he wasn’t sure why he rambled on. Maybe it was simply momentum. Once he had begun to reveal all of it, for whatever reason, it was impossible to stop. It had sometimes been that way when he had been John Miller and shared his life with her, and Petey the Clown and she was Tina. And when she’d been Ceecee back at his high school. And now, for a few more minutes, it was that way once again. Ellen was not someone he could hold back from; she was someone with whom you shared, no matter what.

  It was more than that. Something else prodded him to talk, something that was not from the life of Carl Johnson or John Miller or Petey the Clown or Esbiorn the divine bear … one of the few lifetimes he had not shared with her. It was something that emerged from the mists that still shrouded his most ancient memories of how it had been to be One Who Sees.

  “Can you show me again?” Ellen asked.

  “Otherspace?”

  She nodded. “Now that I understand what I’ve traveled through, I want to see it with different eyes, as more than just a cold, cold fog I’ve somehow skipped through in these years … decades … centuries.”

  He held out his hands as he moved around the table toward her. Her hands felt dry in his. He gripped her fingers tightly, closed his eyes, and let his instincts take over. Sharply, he—

  —moved.

  In an instant, the room vanished and they were surrounded by the icy grayness of otherspace. A sound—a gasp—came from a shape he recognized. Forlorn Frank from the circus! It was as if the clown had been waiting for him.

  Shapes and sounds were distorted and blurred beyond conventional recognition. He could tell Ellen tried to make sense of it. Somewhere in the distance, something glowed faintly, and all around them the shapes, dark and indistinct, wavered and drifted and hovered. One shape, separate from the others, moved toward them, but no matter how close it came, it remained insubstantial.

  Carl knew it was the navigator he’d freed, come to say goodbye.

  Then otherspace vanished.

  As quickly as they had gone, they returned to the warmth and light of reality. Ellen swayed slightly, but his hands steadied her. They’d been gone some time, he realized. She’d grown younger still. She was the youthful Tina, and the Ellen he’d met and married. She was the nurse on the World War I battlefield, and a dozen other women before that. She’d somehow attached herself to his soul and moved through one life to the next, reconnecting with him.

  It had happened more than three hundred years ago, when he met her in 1647. She went by Sarah, and he by Samuel. They’d married and settled down, and a year later were accused of being witches. It was when he had pulled her through otherspace the first time.

  And she knew—all of it—with her eyes opened to what otherspace truly was and the touching of their consciousnesses as they hovered, they shared the memories of their past lives. She was why he’d never asked Shelly to marry him. He needed Ellen, not Shelly. He needed Ellen and Tina, and Sarah and Ceecee.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “Those shapes—”

  “You saw them?”

  “Before, yes, but distinctly now. Some of them almost familiar.” Her voice trailed off, and her eyes seemed to go unfocussed, to look straight through him as if he wasn’t there. Finally, she shook her head and frowned thoughtfully. “I should be with them, shouldn’t I? My spirit should drifting in that cauldron of souls. I should be there with old friends from lifetimes ago.”

  “I don’t know, Ellen.”

  “Or is it Sarah?” She smiled. “Tina? I didn’t like the name Tina. I thought it sounded brittle. But it was good for a performer, wasn’t it?”

  “Ellen suits you.”

  There was the sound of the front door slamming open, and then of running feet pounding through the small living room. A moment later, Jerrah appeared in the kitchen doorway, skidding to a stop against the frame. Her lean, angular face was animated, flushed; the mask of resignation she often wore replaced by one of exultation.

  “Melusine’s still with me!” Jerrah said. “In the back of my mind, I can feel her.”

  “But she—”

  “—said she would go. I know. She would have, too, except I asked her to stick around for a little while.”

  Ellen studied her and opened her mouth to say something, but Carl cut in.

  “Melusine is still with you? And you’re all right with that? You’ve complained about the ‘it’ riding around inside of your head, making you do things and—”

  “That was the bad ‘it,’ that shipkeeper person. I sort of like this one. Like I said, I told Melusine she can stick around a while.”

  “Melusine, you should leave,” Carl said. “Lose your hold on Jerrah and let your soul go free.” He told Jerrah/Melusine about his confrontation with the shipkeeper, the resolution, and finding Melusine’s body. “You shouldn’t be here. You should be—”

  “Dead, I know.” The voice was Jerrah’s but the speech pattern wasn’t. Carl realized Melusine was in control now. “I
do not know why I did not die when my body did. There was a pull always before. It took work to stay connected to someone else’s mind. Always my body tried to pull me back. But I stopped feeling that. There is a different pull now, lighter, probably to this place where … souls … go. A pull I’ve never felt before. So unknown. I will not stay here long, as I am curious about this destination, this cauldron Ellen calls it. But I will stay awhile. Jerrah says I must truly see this world.”

  “So Jerrah’s really letting you stay?” Carl asked.

  “Until Melusine’s ready for otherspace,” Ellen said softly.

  “Yeah,” Jerrah said. “I figure I’ll take her to Disney World and to see the big redwood trees on the west coast. Maybe go to the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. All the touristy things. Maybe we’ll even take in a couple of plays on Broadway and go to one of the big circuses. It’ll be great. It’ll take everything in my bank account for grad school, but it’ll be a blast. I’ll have company and will only have to buy one ticket to get in. And I figure we better get to planning all of this.”

  ***

  Epilogue

  The Coles Bros. Circus had changed in the decades since Carl and Ellen had last seen it. The circus was playing for one week only in New Jersey, and Carl had driven them up for what he believed was his first real vacation in a very long while.

  It was called the Coles Bros. Circus of the Stars now, and it boasted being “The World’s Largest Circus Under the Big Top.”

  Jerrah, Carl, and Ellen sat halfway up the center section of bleachers where they could clearly see all three rings. So different, Carl thought. All glitz and garish music. The simple calliope was gone, replaced by a sound system with speakers that blared from every corner. But it was at the same time familiar, the feel and smells of it, and the sounds of the animals, and mostly the delighted squeals of the children as the clowns paraded by.

  There were the Cartoon Poodles, colorful canines performing an amazing array of tricks; the royal Bengal tigers, which Ellen declared her favorite; the “world’s largest canon” that shot an acrobat called the Human Canon Ball across the arena; the Angels of the Air from Guatemala, and a woman who could stand on one finger. Carl liked the elephants the best, though none on display could match Freida’s size.