by Jean Rabe
“He exists, Melusine!” the shipkeeper repeated. “The Bright One exists!”
Her heart pounded as her mind made the adjustment and the meaning of the words penetrated.
“How—” she began, but the shipkeeper raced on.
“We have confirmed that there is a navigator on the world below. He has exercised his power! He has moved through otherspace! Our own navigator has charted his paths! We are now certain!”
Melusine’s eyes went to the liaison. The full globe of the world they hovered near had been replaced by a barely curving segment of green and brown with only dots of blue. Near one side was a glittering speck of pure white. Near the other, a pale streak of gray.
For a long moment, she only looked. “But surely he has no ship?” she said, bewildered. “The distress signal received on Elthor, it said his ship had crashed.”
The shipkeeper swallowed. “The navigator tells me the Bright One apparently has no need of a ship. He can travel through otherspace without one.”
Another silence as Melusine studied the image, trying to gauge its scale and failing. But to travel any distance, even the most minuscule, to be able even to enter otherspace unaided—
She turned to the navigator, starting to speak, and belatedly remembered to thrust her hands into the liaison. “Are you certain, navigator?” she asked. “Did you see him do as you claim?”
There are no certainties.
“It is certain enough for me,” the shipkeeper said harshly, turning his face to Melusine. “Are you prepared to carry out your part of the mission?”
Melusine looked again at the image in the liaison. “It cannot be him!”
“Cannot be whom?” the shipkeeper asked, in a cold tone that told her he knew perfectly well whom she meant.
“It cannot be Delphoros—can it? After all this time? No, surely it is only his descendant. Or no, with this world’s strong glow, more likely a native.”
“That is for you to determine, not I.” The shipkeeper regarded her coldly. “The council believes Delphoros still lives, and is here. Otherwise we would not have been dispatched to this world. We have Elthor’s only remaining navigator with us; the council would not lightly risk him on such a long journey as this if they did not believe. Confirm that, if you are able, that the Bright One is here.”
She shivered, earning another cold-eyed scowl from the shipkeeper. Forcing herself to appear stoic, she turned from the liaison toward the waiting, eagerly writhing augmentor.
***
Chapter 17
Carl Johnson
Carl first noticed the girl as he was eating breakfast in the Embers a few blocks from the motel. Short, probably five-two, she seemed thinner than she actually was because of loose-fitting faded jeans and a man’s black cotton workshirt two or three sizes too big. A pack was slung over one shoulder. Despite a round, strong-featured face, she looked a little vulnerable, like a lost child as she stood just inside the entrance peering around the room. Still, her air of diffidence and confusion held Carl’s attention for several seconds before he went back to his bacon and eggs.
When the hostess showed the girl to a table a few feet from Carl’s booth, she moved around it and sat facing him, then snatched up the menu and concentrated on it with a frown. Carl glanced at her from time to time as he lingered over his second cup of coffee and scanned the newspaper he’d gotten from a vending machine in the restaurant foyer.
Ready to leave, he found the girl staring at him—or at least she averted her eyes in the quick, nervous way people did when he caught them staring.
She ought to know better, he thought: probably she’d been stared at often enough herself. Brunette, with hair cut short and shaggy, hazel-eyed, she wasn’t beautiful in any conventional sense, but she was certainly a woman to look at twice, like a young, road-company Anjelica Huston. As he was paying his check, Carl saw that she was looking at him again, quick little glances from under lowered lids as she hurriedly spread jelly on the thick triangles of toast the waitress had just brought her. Repressing an impulse to see what she’d do if he waved at her, he pocketed his change and left.
He climbed into the Mazda and jammed the keys into the ignition, but stopped before the automatic turn of the key to start the engine. His plan when he’d checked out of the Adler had been simple: grab breakfast and take off for home before another junkie burglar with better aim took a shot at him. But now, with the actual start of the drive only a twist of his wrist away, he felt uncertain. As if he’d forgotten something.
Going home and laying his cards on the table with Harry, hoping that either the nightmares would go away or he could learn to cope with them—surely that was the sensible thing to do. Wasn’t it?
Was it? Excuse me, boss, but you were absolutely right, I don’t exist … at least not before I came to work for you. Shall we just forget it? Or shall I make an appointment with a half-dozen shrinks? Would Harry buy that? Could he buy it himself? Sweep it all under that proverbial carpet?
But what could be left to do here? Conduct a house-to-house search for someone who might remember him? Take out an ad in the Morgantown paper? Do you know this man? REWARD for info leading to—
Sure, Carl. He snorted. Real smart. Go public. Why not call the tabloids while you’re at it? They’d give you front page headlines, not just a cheesy line or two buried in the classifieds.
Still … wasn’t there something more he could do before totally writing off the first twenty-some years of his life? After all, there were a dozen tantalizing hints that he had once lived here, despite the newspaper articles and employment records that didn’t exist, despite the neighbors who said they’d never seen him before. Maybe he should check courthouse records. Or dig deeper into the Tribune. Work up the nerve to look for his mother’s obituary, for instance. Or Omega’s.
There’s an idea. Find out what happened to Omega: Had it died? Changed names? Never existed at all? That was an avenue he hadn’t taken even one step on.
“Mister?”
Startled, he looked toward the voice. The girl from the restaurant stood beside the car, leaning over awkwardly and squinting in at him. She smiled unevenly and asked, “Are you going into town, by any chance?”
Like the flip of a coin, the question decided him. “Matter of fact, yes. Need a lift?”
“Yeah. If you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit. Hop in.” He reached across and unlocked the passenger-side door as she scooted around the car. She shot him a nervous little grin and skidded onto the seat.
“Thanks,” she said.
With the girl in the car, her backpack nestled between her shins and both their seatbelts fastened, he glanced at her again. Her eyes weren’t hazel, he saw from close up. More of a light brown with the faintest greenish cast near the center, rather attractive.
“Don’t see many hitchhikers anymore,” he remarked.
“Oh, I don’t usually—That is, I—You know how buses are? It was just pulling away when I—I was going to walk, but—” She made an odd little shoulder twitch, absurdly helpless looking. She obviously wasn’t used to doing this sort of thing, he thought, wondering idly what had prompted her to start now.
“Don’t they always,” he said, starting the car and twisting in his seat as he backed out of the parking space. “And it’s always an hour before the next one shows up.”
For a block or so, neither of them said anything. Out of the corner of his eye, Carl could see the girl still glancing at him with half-lowered lids, as if afraid to look at him directly, as if she were working up the nerve to speak. Or act. Belatedly, he remembered a news item a few weeks before about a family traveling in Florida who’d been robbed, the husband killed by a hitchhiker. As he made the turn onto Main, she cleared her throat.
“This sounds dumb, I know,” she said, the words coming out in a nervous rush, “but, I—your eyes are exactly like my Aunt Kitty’s.”
“Kitty for Katherine?” he asked, when she didn’t go on.
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The girl laughed, still nervous. “No, Kitty because her eyes are that same yellowy gray, like a cat’s. Her name’s Toini, really,” she said, spelling it when he arched his eyebrows in a question.
“Toini? Never heard that one before.”
“It’s Finnish. She’s a Finn. My uncle met her when she was in New York working for the U.N. Yellow eyes are common in Finland, she says.”
“Are they?” A brief, idiotic pleasure rose at this unexpected but useless clue to his past—or his ancestry, at least.
She nodded. “You two are the only ones I ever saw with eyes like that, though. Are you Finnish, by any chance?”
“I don’t think so. My name’s Johnson, Carl Johnson.”
Her mouth pursed as she considered his name, apparently as an intellectual exercise. “Swedish,” she pronounced. “Lots of Swedes in southern Finland, my aunt says. They intermarry, of course, so you could have gotten your yellow eyes that way.”
“Think so?” Carl noticed that she hadn’t offered her own name. He didn’t ask. She was sounding more hectic, more nervous with every sentence. Was she high? Like the murderous burglar? Or that Florida hitchhiker? Did he detect a hint of pot? He grimaced inwardly. He’d be glad when she—and whatever she had in that pack—were out of his car.
The conversation hobbled on with long pauses on both sides until they were moving through downtown Morgantown. The girl didn’t seem to want to get out, despite her obvious uneasiness. One more good reason to have a destination. A block from the library, Carl said, “I’m going to the library. That close enough to wherever you’re going?”
“Oh. Sure.” She drew her knees up slightly, as if she had to gather herself together before she could move. “You can drop me off anywhere. The library’s fine.” The Mazda was barely parked before she released the seatbelt and leaped out as if escaping.
“Thanks a bunch,” she said though the open window. “You—uh, you be careful, huh?”
Be careful? Carl watched the girl walk away. Four or five steps on, she stumbled over a seam in the sidewalk, caught herself, almost dropped the knapsack, half-turned to look over her shoulder, and tripped again, this time over her own feet. She darted one last glance over her shoulder and hurried away.
She’s the one better watch her step, Carl thought.
O O O
In the library, Carl headed straight for the microfilmed newspapers, determined to look up his mother’s obituary.
But he didn’t. His fingers were touching the February, 1970, reel when he realized he still didn’t have the courage. Or the sense.
Okay. He’d start with Omega. The computer screen told him how to choose the index he wanted, and how to search for an entry once it was called up. Carl was oddly relieved that the display was green on black: at least he wouldn’t have to fight the shivers of looking at a fog, even if it wasn’t the fog.
Under Omega Corporation, he found a number of listings, and decided to start with the one for January 22. The headline looked promising: LOCAL COMPANY LAYS OFF 200. Sign of a failing business, maybe, and 1971 was the year he’d left Morgantown … or thought he had. He remembered looking at his own individual layoff notice months later, plain white rather than traditional pink … unless he’d dreamed that. His hands had been shaking as he read, wondering what to do next. First Omega, then Garland. Where else in this town could a tech writer—
Carl gave himself a shake. More Sunday supplement memories? Pulling the January reel of the Tribune from the shelf, he took it to a viewer and followed the instructions Mrs. Gates had given him yesterday.
The grainy images streamed across the screen in a blur as he cranked toward the 22nd, not even the boldest headlines registering in his mind.
Until the January 13 edition.
In general, the newspaper looked familiar, and he remembered some of the national stories and a few of the statewide ones. There’d been the Jackson State shootings, and in June Cambodia was in the headlines, not to mention then-Vice President Agnew and one of his periodic wars with the press. But the local stories were something else. The only one he remembered was the series concerning the town council and their running battle with the mayor, and that, he recalled, had gotten statewide coverage after a few months. It was not a matter of not remembering the other stories, until he saw them in the paper and was reminded of them. He simply didn’t recall anything about them. To make matters worse, he couldn’t think of any local stories at all from the time period that he should have lived here. But at least, he noted, the mayor was still named Sawyer, and the leader of the city council was still named Drake. Those things hadn’t changed.
He looked at another day. Two or three pages into it, he stopped, blinking. What?
Frowning, he cranked the film backward.
And stopped at the front page, his breath catching in his throat. Spread across six columns was a picture. Blurred flakes of snow and a concrete bridge railing in the foreground, a woman being dragged from the icy river water in the background. In Washington, DC, the headline blared and the photo caption elaborated, an Air Florida 727 had crashed into the Potomac, killing seventy-eight people.
He recognized the headlines, the picture, the story, remembered them vividly. This was not, he knew, another Sunday supplement memory, but a real memory: no wavering, no uncertainty about its truth from moment to moment, only the rock solid feeling of reality.
But none of it, he realized an instant later, had anything whatsoever to do with him or even with Morgantown. This was something that had happened a thousand miles away, in a place he had never even visited.
But as he stared at the nearly-decade-old images, he remembered something else. Something about himself, something with that same rock-hard edge of reality, but something that also resurrected the icy fog of the nightmares and set it brushing at the edges of his mind.
As far back as grade school, disasters like the 727 crash had been the markers in his life. Where others pegged their lives to birthdays and Christmases and family trips, he had somehow pegged his life to events in which human lives were lost.
Worse, when the disasters had been big enough, the loss of life great enough, he had known they had happened—no, had known that something had happened—before he heard or read about it in the news.
As if being nonexistent isn’t enough, now I’m psychic, too?
What a thought! Entirely too many tabloid headlines read in the checkout lines. “Get real,” he muttered aloud. The spoken derision at least diluted the chill.
But did not banish it altogether.
Nor did it stop the memories. Unsummoned, they continued to drift into view. At least a dozen times, life had seemed to … what? Pause? Something like that. The world had gone still. Each time, he’d known that, somewhere, violent death was claiming more than its usual share. Not where. Not how. Just that it was happening, and that he would probably hear about it on tomorrow’s news.
As if he could sense the lives winking out.
The waters of a lake in Cameroon had quietly released a cloud of carbon dioxide and suffocated three thousand sleeping people. Carl, facing the screen of his computer half the world away, had sat with closed eyes for at least five minutes. Exactly as he had when that cloud of poisonous gas overwhelmed Bhopal, or the earth shifted to bury tens of thousands in Iran or floods claimed thousands in Bangladesh, or … or …
He looked through the reels of decades-earlier papers. Headline after headline of disasters catching his attention. February, 1940: CIRCUS HOME BURNS; LOSS ESTIMATED AT 150 THOUSAND. He read: In one of the most disastrous fires to strike Rochester in many years, the winter quarters of the Cole Bros. Circus was gutted, causing between $150,000 and $200,000 damage. Elephants and horses were set loose on the city streets.
May, 1950: WRECKED CHICAGO TROLLEY IN WHICH MANY DIED.
December, 1957: LEWISHAM TRAIN DISASTER LEAVES NINETY-TWO PEOPLE DEAD.
July, 1965: KANSAS AVENUE MELAN BRIDGE COLLAPSES, CARS AND CONCRE
TE TUMBLE INTO THE WATER.
Disaster after disaster, he could recall clearly … even though he hadn’t yet been born when many of them had taken place.
Carl shook his head, trying to force the remembered electrical chill from his mind, just as he must have done before. But he couldn’t. Now that the memories had returned from their exile, the insane events of the past few days—the nightmares, the fog, the impossible escapes from certain death, each accompanied by an excruciatingly intense version of the same chill—wouldn’t allow him to banish them again.
Talk about tabloids! He could see the headlines in the supermarket now: MAN IN FOG FOR YEARS ESCAPES DEATH, SEES MISTY DISASTERS.
This time the conscious attempt at ridicule didn’t help. The chill remained as he yanked at the microfilm crank, leaving the 727 and its icy demise behind.
At least, he told himself sharply, it’s something I remember from the Morgantown days that checks out.
The next story he recognized was a flood near Lima, Peru. Six hundred dead. The tingling unease that had preceded that one had been … impressive. The reel ran out. Like a hunter now, Carl went on, unsure of his quarry but hearing the muffled echoes of its footsteps.
Some small measure of relief came in later reels as he discovered that disasters weren’t the only things he remembered. He remembered Barney Clark getting his artificial heart. He remembered Solidarity.
But mostly there were disasters. Neck hairs rising, he remembered the tanker truck that had burned in a tunnel in California. An explosion at an antiques exhibition in Italy, thirty-three dead.
Then, puzzlingly, there was an outbreak of tornadoes that he had not the faintest recollection of. According to a special, picture-filled supplement, two had passed close to Morgantown. Twisted trees, smashed houses and outbuildings, fifteen injuries but miraculously no fatalities. And a semi-trailer standing neatly on end in the median strip of the bypass with the cab balanced above it. Shouldn’t he at least remember that?