by Jean Rabe
“But you’ve … set foot …” she seemed to find the expression odd “ … on a ship, your ship. They have to be similar.”
Carl brushed past her and went into the stall. “Do you mind? Ladies are supposed to pee in the other bathroom.”
He heard the door bang open and closed.
“They have to be similar, the ships,” he said. He pictured a control room surrounded by the same kind of grayness of the fog he slipped through. Was it a memory? Or another fragment of a nightmare, this time somehow intruding into his waking consciousness? “This ship—”
Could he find it? Could he swim his way through otherspace and find Melusine’s ship? Could it possibly be that easy?
He found a soda machine behind the park building and jimmied it open and got three bottles before returning to the car.
“Where are we going?” Ellen asked. She sat in the front seat this time.
“To where I landed … crashed. Somehow I think I can find the spot.”
Ellen stared blankly ahead, fingers wrapped tightly around the soda bottle. In the backseat, Jerrah leaned forward with interest.
“We have to go farther south,” Carl said. He pulled in a deep breath and pressed down on the accelerator. The two halves of his mind maintained an uneasy truce as the car sped on and the day melted.
They had to walk the last quarter mile as the sun was just starting to set.
A narrow dirt road they’d turned down had become a footpath, at best, with wide deep ruts on one side. It was half obscured by weeds and grass, and it ended in a small clearing a couple hundred yards into the woods. From the beer cans, empty cigarette packs, and other litter, it was apparent people still came here—teenagers most likely. The main road behind them was well out of sight of the clearing, and even the sound of an occasional passing car faded as the trio threaded its way through the trees beyond.
Though the area beyond was not fenced, it looked untouched. There were no trails and no sections less overgrown than others. Fallen branches and even rotted trees had not been removed, just left to decay on the ground, gradually being devoured by the soil.
He felt it, an aura of protection, some field generated by the ship’s beacon that somehow kept the land around the buried ship clear of dangerous—or curious—life forms. The aura had kept this near square mile untouched for centuries, even though it was surrounded on three sides by cleared farmland.
“This way,” Carl said. He approached a particularly thickly overgrown patch where the branches of one tree interlaced with the branches of the next. One massive dead oak, already beginning to crumble, still stood and was held nearly vertical by the living branches of an adjacent tree.
“What do you feel?” Jerrah asked.
“Nothing.”
They stood silent for several minutes. The sun was at the horizon now, casting an orange glow over everything and giving this section a forlorn, haunted look. There’d been birds chirping farther back and bees buzzing around the litter. But there didn’t appear to be a single insect or animal here.
They pressed on.
After a dozen yards the going became easier, the trees thinned and, as if emerging from a living wall, they found themselves in another clearing, this one nearly thirty feet across. The grass, reaching to their knees, was thick and green, except—
Carl rushed forward, thrashing through the grass. He came to a stop near the far side of the clearing. Where he stood, the grass was stunted and twisted, slightly less green than elsewhere. In the center of it was a small crater, its walls burned and baked to a solid, crystalline mass.
“My ship is under there,” Carl said flatly. He recalled that at one time the crater had been larger and deeper—the depth of a four-storey building, the ship at the bottom. But time had eroded that, though the aura from the beacon had held onto this small, blasted bit of ground to help mark its location.
“Jerrah … Melusine …you said the shipkeepers controlled all space travel, right?”
She nodded.
“Maybe your shipkeeper wants me dead so I can’t be used as breeding stock.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Sure it does.” Carl circled the small crater. “If I was able to breed others like me—with the sight—others who could travel through otherspace, your shipkeeper wouldn’t be so powerful himself, would he? He wouldn’t be the last shipkeeper. There would be other shipkeepers trained. He wouldn’t be so exalted then, would he? He wouldn’t be a one-of-a-kind any longer. Maybe they’d even retire him.”
She worked her mouth.
Ellen stepped closer. “So you think he wants you dead so he’ll control all of their … space program?”
“Otherspace program. Yeah, that makes sense to me,” Carl said. “I think he’s nuts. Insane, like Melusine mentioned. But it makes twisted sense. Get rid of me, the breeding stock, and he stays powerful and in control.”
“But he’s old,” Jerrah argued.
“So? He stays powerful and in charge to the last beat of his heart. And he can’t afford to take me on his ship because I don’t need the navigator’s tank to travel through otherspace. He wouldn’t be able to control me, to keep me boxed up with decaying muscles, force-fed nutrients and helpless. He doesn’t want any part of taking me back to Elthor. Because he can’t control me. None of them can control me.”
“He gave us no clue, and—”
“Because he’s cagey-clever,” Carl said.
“And nuts.” This from Ellen.
“Besides, why would he tell you his real plans? You might try to stop him.” He rubbed his chin. “And he has effectively stopped you, Melusine. You said you can’t contact him, nor can you return to your body.”
“My hold on this body is fading … Carl. I can’t return to my body, yet I’m having a difficult time staying here. Help me.” Jerrah dug the ball of her foot against the edge of the crater. “Can you try? To find my ship? Can you use otherspace to search for it? Maybe you can repair whatever is wrong. Perhaps there is something amiss with the augmentor.”
“The answer’s still I don’t know,” Carl returned. “But I intend to see if I can find my ship. That would be a starting point.” He stepped into the crater. “Wait for me.”
“For how long?” Ellen wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the sun; only a sliver of it remained, and it would grow dark soon.
Carl shrugged. “A million years.”
***
Chapter 41
Delphoros
For the first time—the first time that he could clearly remember—he made a conscious effort to look around otherspace. Not just with his eyes, for he realized that he wasn’t even sure that it was his eyes through which he received his impressions of this realm. Or if, in this unknown dimension, he even possessed eyes. He had the eerie feeling that, in the transition, he developed other organs which sensed his surroundings here, but that his mind—unable to cope with their outputs directly—translated them into more acceptable forms.
Forms that would, in real space, have been perceived by his eyes.
Below him, he could see no solidity, and the distant vortices that perhaps were the phantom images of giant suns could be seen with equally fuzzy clarity in all directions. He could feel nothing but the seemingly stippled wind that swept around him. And he wondered if he, himself, was any more solid than the gray around him, any more substantial than the forms that hovered, unfocussed, everywhere
As he floated there in the endless gray, a feeling of helplessness intruded. I don’t know how I enter and leave otherspace. I just do it. How?
For an instant, the feeling of helplessness blossomed into panic, and the gray began to fade toward black. An overwhelming sense of vertigo spun his consciousness like a pinwheel, and he felt as if his very being was draining away, being scattered into the whirling, disappearing grayness. He tried to grasp the shapes that spun through his senses, but he had nothing with which to grasp them. He tried to scream, to shout, but the growi
ng darkness swallowed the sound—or the mere thought of the sound—without a trace. He felt it closing around him, muffling, and suffocating him.
The icy chill gathered itself tightly around every scattered, imaginary cell of his body.
It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter that I don’t know how I come here or how I leave or how I am able to move. It only matters that I can do it.
Slowly the black receded and the grayness of otherspace returned.
He searched.
As each shape approached him, he reached out to it with whatever senses he possessed. Some shapes retreated, darting away, merging with others in the distance, reappearing only to retreat again.
But one came closer and closer.
As did another.
And another.
The shapes were not illusions, nor his mind playing tricks. They existed, somewhere here in their own reality of otherspace, or in another reality, another universe that lay beyond otherspace.
They existed, and they were communicating … thoughts, images, feelings … reached out to him, touched him, triggered his own long-buried memories of other realities, of other dreams.
One shape stood out above all the others.
Tycho. By concentrating and clearing his mind, he could understand the shadows’ whispers as words in a variety of languages.
“Thank you,” Tycho said in Danish. “For teaching me about the stars. I finally discovered what this—dark matter—is.”
Carl/Delphoros studied the shadow. “You were my teacher,” he returned in Danish.
“Never,” Tycho said. “It was always I who learned from you. Perhaps you just never realized that.”
Freida was there, too, as well as Forlorn Frank, some of the dogs he used to clean up after, a soldier he’d shared a trench with in WWI, and a Roman gladiator he’d been friends with. They floated beyond Tycho.
“I find myself thinking about you from time to time,” Delphoros said. He peered through the shapes. Was Shelly here? For a moment he thought he recognized her form. “I relive our sessions in my dreams, Tycho. They are so vivid I can feel the stone floor against my bare feet.”
“I hope they are fond thoughts you hold,” Tycho said.
Delphoros nodded, and then said, “Always. Only good thoughts,” in case the spirit could not detect the motion of his bobbing head.
“I’ve … we’ve … been trying to reach you,” Tycho continued. “We would sense you here, but always you were gone before—”
“I had not wholly understood then,” Delphoros said. “Perhaps I still don’t. That—”
“That dark matter is the essence of life,” Tycho finished. “You understand well enough. It was my one wish … to discover its nature. I achieved that with my death.”
“Would you call this …” Delphoros searched for a word. “heaven?”
The spirit remained silent for a time, its shape leaning to one side as if it pondered something. Behind it the other spirits continued their hushed conversations.
“All souls come here,” Tycho finally said. “Good and tainted, heroes and miscreants. This is the other side of life.”
Otherspace, Delphoros whispered.
“I cannot say if there is something beyond this,” the Dane continued. “But I would hope so.”
“The other side of death. Because even spirits die,” Delphoros finished, and that he had contributed to those deaths clawed at his heart.
“Yes, even spirits die,” Tycho echoed.
“When will you join us?” This from the WWI soldier.
In a million years, Delphoros thought again. He didn’t give them an answer.
More shapes had appeared in the passing moments, some familiar, but most of them not. There was the outline of a young Egyptian boy; Delphoros could not remember his name, but he recalled that he looked after him once.
How far back did his lives lead?
“I have tasks,” he told Tycho.
“The ship that hovers in this place and feasts—”
“Yes, that ship and the dead one below. I must see to them.” Then he willed himself away, focusing on an image and an imagined direction and trusting that this would work and not strand him in hard-packed earth. He’d likely join all these souls in otherspace for good in that event. He felt the fog shifting and a bolt of coldest-cold went through him.
Then he was in utter darkness.
His ship.
Delphoros had not thought to bring a flashlight; perhaps he wasn’t such an advanced being after all. A rare smile played at the corner of his lip. The place had the feeling of a tomb, pitch dark and fusty, the air thin and laced heavy with dust, silt under his bare feet. He heard the shushing sound of the silt as he shuffled around and bumped into various things.
This indeed had been his ship, at the same time his companion and his prison. He and his small crew had traversed galaxies in it, going so impossibly fast, fast, fast through otherspace. At that time Delphoros thought he was necessary to Elthor’s quest to explore the farthest reaches, that he was one of only a few with the gift of sight—One Who Sees—and who could pilot through the dark matter. It had taken him more than a handful of such voyages before he realized all of the truths … and it had taken how many centuries for him to recapture his true name and memories? … that he didn’t need the tank. The tank was a cell meant to hold him, the nutrients and surgeries vehicles to control him. He was a puppet then, powerful, but a puppet nonetheless. All the navigators were.
How could a race as advanced as the Elthorans hold its navigators thusly?
He shook his head when a rush of memories came at him: Roman slaves, Coolie railroad workers, WWII death camps; all societies had it in them to subjugate others.
When he’d discovered the truths about otherspace, so disturbing that his mind had buried all the pieces until his meeting with Tycho minutes ago, he had decided to crash his ship. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life—because it meant killing the crew and the living ship, and himself; he believed he would die in the doing. And it was harder still because the shipkeeper controlled him, with the nutrients that made his incredible mind so malleable. It had taken every measure of determination to break the control, and he’d only managed it while the ship was in otherspace. There the shipkeeper was the most vulnerable.
He’d set a course to crash on this world, as it was the closest, pulling the ship through otherspace, and knowing full well what was happening to the spirits as he fulfilled his dark plan.
Delphoros bumped into a shattered control panel and his feet crunched over something hard—bones?—interrupting his recollection He continued to stumble around in the pitch, finding the dead augmentor, the shipkeeper’s chair, and finally coming to the navigator’s tank. It had split like an egg from the impact of the crash. He remembered the painful, jarring sensation.
The memory was so real his chest started heaving as he fought for breath. The nutrients had spilled during the crash, leaving his naked form exposed to air he couldn’t breathe. But as he lay there dying, he did start to breathe. His surgically-altered lungs found a way to accept small quantities of oxygen.
He’d rested in the remains of the tank for days, unable to move, watching as the lights dimmed and the living ship died around him. He’d heard no movements, and so he knew he’d killed the crew. And though he was confident he would join them soon, he continued to live.
When feeling slowly crept back into his limbs, he’d twitch the muscles in exploration of sensation. His stomach burned from hunger, but the nutrients were gone, and he had no way to feed himself. He flopped about on the floor like a fish thrown on the bank of a river until—eventually—he was able to stand by pulling himself up on a broken counter. His feet bled from the shards of the broken tank.
His heart pounded from fear and the revelations of killing the ship and crew. His stomach growled in protest of being empty. Delphoros found no way out of the ship; it had been cocooned by the earth it had slammed in
to.
But he found a way out through otherspace.
It was the first time he had traveled there without a tank and ship, and he was exhilarated by the icy cold sensation that cloaked him. He saw the shapes then, as he had on his previous voyages, and knew they were souls. He did not know he could communicate with them, or that they were trying to reach out. He was merely “passing through” and within minutes found himself on the ground near where the ship had buried itself, a large blasted crater to mark its passing.
The events of how he had come to be here, and what he had done—murder, going against the Elthoran service—were so egregious that he thrust them away, buried them like he’d buried the ship and its crew.
And he started the first of his many, many lives on this earth.
He remembered running with primitive people who hunted buffalos—though he could never bring himself to actually kill one of the large beasts. He worked on a massive stone wall in China, groomed horses for British Parliament members, herded sheep in the mountains, and became a vintner in France. All the time he stayed in the background, always the helper, the worker, never anyone who would rise to prominence and become well known.
Never wanting to draw attention to himself.
There were so many pieces of so many lives, he could not take it all in, instead relishing fragments that seemed to mean the most.
In Ancient Egypt, he mentored a boy, not one of royalty, but the eldest son of one of the pyramid architects. Delphoros taught him the doctrine of eternal life as it was written in the XVIIIth Dynasty.
“In the Papyrus of Ani,” Delphoros told the boy in the memory, “the deceased is seen as having arrived at a place that is far away and remote. Here there is neither air to breathe nor water to drink. But he is not thirsty. Here he asks a question: ‘How long have I to live?” The great god Annu answers: auk er heh en heh aha en heh.”