The Cauldron (20 page)

Chapter 34

Carl Johnson

Summer intoxicated Petey. It didn’t matter the city or town the circus played in, summer had a wonderful sameness to it that he couldn’t get enough of. No matter how much he sweated, and no matter how many times he had to touch up his smearing makeup, he didn’t mind the heat. He treasured everything that came with the season. He loved the crowds mostly; they were the biggest in the summer, and for some reason the children responded more wildly to the clown routines as the temperatures soared. He even enjoyed the humdrum duties on the grounds—cleaning up after the performing dogs, bathing the elephants … he tended to give Freida special attention, and he usually got just as soaked as her.

When he wasn’t spending his free time with Tina he’d walk into town, go up one side and down the other of the first business district he came to—the only business district when the venue was on the “dinkburg” side. Rarely did he buy anything, but on those occasions when he did it was usually a bauble for Tina, a pretty glittery pin or a fancy hair clip, nothing that would take up any real space in her tiny trailer. Once he bought her a little heart locket and inside put a tiny photograph of himself and Freida.

Whenever possible he fed his summer addiction: ice cream. He didn’t count that as shopping, as there was nothing tangible to bring back with him to clutter his life. He’d settle for a double-dip cone from a parlor downtown, strawberry and pistachio being his favorites, but he preferred buying ice cream from one of the little trucks that drove slowly through neighborhoods, a musical jingle coming from a loudspeaker on the hood.

Do dee doot doot doodle oodle oodle oodle doooo, the tune played over and over. From Minnesota to Texas, California to North Carolina, the music was usually the same, no doubt something installed in the ice cream trucks at the factory where they were made. Petey hummed the tune so often that the circus’s calliope player scored a similar piece for one of the clown routines.

He hummed it to Tina as they lay in her trailer, a small oscillating fan keeping time and struggling ineffectually to cool them. She usually asked him to hum Glenn Miller’s “Moon Love” or Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit.” But this night she seemed content with his simple ice cream melody.

Petey loved Tina, but he hadn’t said the words yet. He figured he didn’t really need to; she had to know how he felt. She’d said the words, though, had that first night they’d spent together, almost every day since, and again just a few minutes ago.

“I love you, Bone Man,” she said.

“Bone Man, eh? Because of my—”

“No.” She smiled dreamily and traced her initials in the sweat sheen on his chest. “Because your elbows stick out, your wrists. You’re so … thin.”

“Skinny. You were going to say skinny.”

“Tall and thin.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Take what?”

“The nickname, Bone Man. It sounds sweet coming from you.” He wrapped one of her curls around his thumb. “I’ve had lots of nicknames. The Divine Bear, I was called once. Don’t remember how I got that one, or where I was. My memory plays tricks sometimes.”

“Divine Bear. I like that,” she said. “It sounds religious and powerful and—”

A rush of sound swept past her tiny trailer, a group of people laughing, someone shuffling and kicking at a can or something metallic. A catcall whistle came, followed by a high-pitched giggle; Petey recognized the whistler as one of his fellow clowns, Forlorn Frank, he always lamely flirted with the ladies. When the noise dissipated, Petey hummed another strain of his ice cream tune.

“Divine Bear,” he repeated when finished. “There’s something important locked up in that particular memory. Wish I could retrieve it.”

“What about asking Madam Alambra? Maybe she could hypnotize you and help you remember.”

Petey scowled. He knew Madam Alambra was a sideshow fake. But her costumes were impressive, she’d perfected a thick, almost unintelligible accent, and her use of flash powder was well-timed.

“I knew something very important back then,” Petey continued. “Knew it before I had that particular nickname. I think … somehow I think … it’s why I’m here.”

“In the circus?”

He shook his head.

“In my trailer?”

“Here,” he repeated. “It’s why I’m here.”

O O O

Carl had passed out on the floor between the ping pong table and the chest freezer. He’d been staring at Jerrah, talking to Charlie, still trying to puzzle out how Charlie thought to drive out to the resort in the storm. Carl came to for a moment, when Charlie and Ellen lugged him upstairs and stretched him out on the couch.

“I’m calling the hospital,” Ellen said. “Have them send an ambulance. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

Carl opened his mouth to protest, but he blacked out again. That’s when the dreams found him. He was back with Tina in her trailer talking about the Divine Bear, and then he was—

O O O

—Esbiorn, whose name meant “divine bear.” In the dream image Esbiorn hovered at Tycho’s shoulder, both of them dressed in the voluminous dark clothes popular four centuries past. It was summer, and the fabric was too heavy for the weather, but Esbiorn and his mentor were so absorbed with their science that the heat was only a minor nuisance.

The spider-web wrinkles around Tycho’s eyes were thicker than in the previous recollection, the age spots on his constantly-wringing hands more numerous.

“This dark matter, Esbiorn, it vexes me. I know it is there, that it is immense, and yet I cannot wholly quantify it. I study it and note its boundaries by the way the starlight peers around it. I have documented its presence—to the point where I believe my colleagues will concede its existence—and yet I still cannot say precisely what it is.”

“It is
otherspace
,” Esbiorn said.

“
Otherspace
? And that term tells me nothing more about it.
Otherspace
is merely another label for something that I cannot define. It is there … but what is it?”

“I know what
otherspace
is,” Esbiorn said far too softly for the aged Tycho to discern. “It is why I am here.”

O O O

Carl worried about the ambulance. He didn’t want to be taken to a hospital, poked and prodded and given a transfusion. He wanted to regain consciousness and talk to Jerrah … or rather the “it” that had been inhabiting her. Maybe he could call “it” back and force a reasonable conversation. He needed to talk to Charlie too, and get a better explanation than “Hell, I don’t know,” for why the man had come out here in this weather … and fortunately saved his life.

But Carl’s mind was like quicksand, cloying and sucking him further down into a labyrinth of past lives. He could hear conversations from his memories, but not the voices of Ellen or Charlie, and surely they must be talking. He couldn’t hear any sirens.

But he heard Tycho mumbling on and on about dark matter and
otherspace
.

He heard the laughter of children from the circus.

The shooshing sound water and gravel made in his miner’s pan and the thin sound of a piano from the saloon he and other miners favored.

He heard music and languages, caught an image of a pharaoh, and—

Then sink deeper, he thought. Sink all the way back, all the way to the bottom.

All the way back to Elthor.

O O O

When he had first recalled being John Miller, and before that Petey the Clown, it had been jolting, but manageable … because he thought he was human. To know otherwise … he sucked in the damp air with a hiss. The world around him spun and vanished, sending him whirling through emptiness, and then his nightmares were enveloping him, drowning him.

Only they weren’t nightmares.

They were memories.

But there weren’t the solid crystal clear memories of the circus or of his time with Tycho studying the stars. Around these memories hovered an aura of vagueness and unreality. All the scenes and sounds, all the thoughts dancing around him had been his at one time. They belonged to him, but he did not consider them a part of him any longer.

There was a name that might have been his long centuries before—Delphoros, but its sound was alien, and his tongue could not form it properly.

There was a world—Elthor, and he knew he had lived on it, though not for any great length of time. It, too, felt distant and unreal, as if it was another person’s world, not his. And he did not like the place.

There was the icy shifting grayness of
otherspace
. Something about it, no one knew what, allowed for fast travel through it to other stars … to those who had the gift to navigate it. There were privileges, protection, a near-immortality that came with that gift. Part of that was a result of entering
otherspace
itself.

But the clearest memory was the isolation. That image stretched solidly from then to now. Isolation, not only in the exploration ships he had guided through the mind-numbing chill of
otherspace
, but in the days and weeks between voyages. Isolation from the touch of another while he was maintained in the nutrient tank, a physical and mental detachment. Few could speak with him while he was in the tank, and they needed equipment to do so.

He went by Delphoros, a name his shipkeeper mother had given him when he was born in
otherspace
. The name meant “life star” in the old tongue. He didn’t see Elthor until he was able to walk, his mother’s missions having kept them away from the home world that long. The only Elthoran to be born in the space between, he was touted as an omen and given near-celebrity status upon his landing.

“And now ladies and gentlemen, the act in the center ring—”

As a child he was never alone on the paths that wound between Elthor’s buildings and the wider ones that linked cities, artful stone ribbons that were smooth and pleasantly cool beneath his bare feet. Other children always followed him, as did a “minder,” a mentor that served in the stead of his mother, who was frequently away on an important mission, sometimes gone for a few years at a time. His brother had been lost in a conflict at a mining asteroid that was attacked by an Alzur ship shortly after Delphoros’s birth. Delphoros had never seen an image of his father, though his mother shared pleasant memories of him and said there was a resemblance. His father navigated a ship … somewhere.

“You look like him,” she said, “with your long face and hard cheeks.”

He craved his mother’s touch, as he suspected all children did, her alabaster fingers tapping across his brow, her musical voice singing him to sleep during rare days between her missions. His minder never sang to him, but she would read, sometimes fanciful tales about children and make believe and all manner of animals—Delphoros loved animals, but usually stories about Elthor’s history and significant people, droll things to one so young, though he tried his best to find something interesting and entertaining in them.

Most of his days were filled with science studies, which he excelled at. Harder for him were the arts, which he actually enjoyed more. Delphoros spent hours staring at the buildings in his home city. They looked like sculptures, sweeping curves that were tall and elegant, much like the Elthorans themselves. Graceful, he decided, the buildings looked so graceful he imagined they could dance. Their composition was artistic, metals meeting wood and stone in patterns that appeared to undulate when viewed from different angles and looked like shattered mosaic mirrors when the rising sun struck them. Some buildings reflected the pink-tinged sky of morning or the clusters of stars at night. The reflected clouds reminded him of the gray fog of
otherspace
.

There was science in the architecture, and Delphoros’s mind curled around the equations necessary to create the curves and angles that made the buildings both pleasing to look at and structurally sound. His instructors believed that he would make an excellent architect, and Delphoros entertained that notion as he progressed through his education. But his mother and some of the city officials pulled him in another direction.

“You were born in
otherspace
,” she said during a visit. Her fingertips were still tapping against his brow. “My beautiful child, my little man, you were meant to be there, in
otherspace
, guiding our ships so they can travel fast, fast, fast.” Her gray-yellow eyes, the shade of the trim of his favorite building, caught his. “Few have the gift of navigation, and if it is indeed your gift, it would be wrong not to embrace it. Elthor needs you. I need you. There are fewer navigators in these years. Perhaps you could someday navigate my ship. You have the sight, and so you have no choice.” In three subsequent conversations she encouraged him to test his aptitude for navigation, and wanting to please her, he finally did—all thoughts of designing magnificent buildings discarded.

The tests were not just intellectual, he was prodded by the finest physicians, his organs measured, his blood analyzed, his brain scanned. His skeletal structure was not important, and he knew he would lose his muscles and the use of his limbs if he was accepted.

… and in the center ring …

His mother was proud that he was more than simply a suitable candidate. He was a prime specimen of what a navigator should be. She did not seem to notice that his heart was not in the service and that he would rather keep his feet on the ground, as well as keep his ability to walk the stone paths of his city.

“Delphoros could be the greatest navigator of Elthor,” he recalled one scientist saying. “Slipping into
otherspace
comes so easy for him. It is a wonder that he’ll need the tank. And we need him. There has not been another birth that has yielded one with the sight. We have only a few left.”

“You have honored me,” she told Delphoros, “By your sacrifice to our service. And you have honored the memory of your father.”

It was by that statement that Delphoros realized his father had died.

Delphoros couldn’t meet her gaze the day he began the alterations that would let him take sustenance from a nutrient tank. The process was only mildly painful; he’d expected it to be much worse. There was a peaceful quality to it, being submerged in the fluid. But at the same time it was horrifying.