GALACTIC POT HEALER

12

"One of them," he said, "is black. The Black Cathedral."

"Not the one they're dredging," Mali said.

"Is he sure?" Joe said. "Could he make such a mistake?" It would kill Glimmung; he knew that intuitively. It would be the end of everything. And of them all. Merely knowing that it existed, and seeing it—he felt the sting of death; ice settled over his heart and remained there. Hopelessly he flashed his torch about, here and there. As if trying to find—and failing to find—a way out.

"You now know," Mali said, "why I wanted to go back up."

He said, "I'll go up with you." He did not want to remain here any longer. Like Mali, he yearned for the surface, for the world above water. That world contained nothing like this... and, he thought, it never should. That was never intended. "Let's go," he said to Mali, and swam upward; with each passing second he was farther up from these blackchilled depths and all that they held. "Give me your hand." He turned, reached back for her...

And then he saw it. Saw the pot. In the rays of his torch.

"What's wrong?" Mali said in alarm; he had ceased rising.

"I have to go back," he said.

"Don't let it draw you down! That's the terrible thing it does; its valence works on you. Climb." She tore her hand away from his and, kicking vigorously, ascended past him, toward the surface above. Her legs kicked as if she were trying to shake loose some binding substance, something which mired her down here.

"You go on up," Joe said. He sank, lower and lower, his eyes never leaving the pot. And steadily he focused his torch on it. It had coral around it, but, for the most part, it remained uncovered. As if, he thought, it was here waiting for me. Trying to ensnare me, the best possible way... through the thing I love most.

Mali hesitated above him, then reluctantly descended until she was parallel with him. "What—" she began, and then she, too, saw the pot; she gasped.

"It's a volute krater," Joe said. "Very large." Already he could distinguish colors emanating from it toward him, the colors which bound him more firmly to this spot than all the cords and seaweed, all the other snares. He sank. And sank some more.

"What can you tell about it?" Mali asked. They had almost reached the pot; Joe's arms extended themselves as if acting on their own will. "Is it—"

"Not earthenware," Joe said. "It's been fired past five hundred degrees centigrade. It may even have been fired at a temperature as high as twelve hundred and fifty degrees. There's a great deal of vitrification over and above the glaze." Now he touched it. Carefully he tugged at it. But the coral held it tight. "Stoneware," he decided. "Not porcelain; it's not translucent. The white of the glaze makes me think—as a guess—that it's a stannic oxide compound. If so it would then be a majolica ceramic piece. Tin-enameling, it's generally called. Like the Delft ceramic offerings." He rubbed the surface of the pot. "From the feel, I'd say it's sgraffitoware, with a lead glaze. See? The pattern has been incised through the slip, disclosing the body color beneath. As I say, this is a volute krater... but with it here we can probably expect to find psykters and amphoras as well; it's just a question of removing the coral deposits and seeing what's below."

"Is it a good pot?" Mali asked. "I mean, to me it looks unique; I think it's terribly pretty. But in your expert opinion—"

"It's superb," he said, simply. "The red glaze is probably from reduced copper; it passed through a reducing atmosphere in the kiln. And ferrous iron. Look at the black. And the yellow, of course, is obtained from antimony. Which produces an excellent yellow." The color of glaze, he reflected, which attracts me the most. The yellows, the blues. I will never change.

He thought, It's almost as if someone put this here for me to find. He rubbed the surface, on and on, appreciating it by tactile sense-impressions, rather than sight. Cupric oxide blues, he said to himself. This pot has everything but that. Did Glimmung have this put here? he asked himself.

To Mali he said, "Has coral been removed from this? Recently? It seems strange it wasn't completely covered."

For a time Mali poked about the pot, examining its surface and that of the coral holding it from below. As she did so he studied the design on the pot. A complex and ornate scene, more ornate even than the istoriato style of Urbino. What did the scene show? He studied it, pondering. Not all of the design was visible. And yet—he was accustomed to filling in missing segments removed from pottery pieces. What does this tell? he asked himself. A story, but of what? He peered.

"I don't like the amount of black on it," Mali said, all at once. "Anything black down here undermines my sense of security." She floated away from the pot, her examination over. "Now can we go back up?" she asked. Her tension had become even greater; it grew with each tick of the clock. "I'm not going to stay down here and extinguish my life voluntarily for one damn dumb pot. Pots just aren't that important."

Joe said, "What did your examination show?"

"Coral has been stripped from it within the last six months." She broke a section of coral away, revealing more of the pot. "I can finish the job in a few minutes, when I have my tools."

Now he saw more of the design. The first panel showed a man seated alone in a bleak and empty room. The next, an intersystem spacecraft of commercial design. The third showed a man—evidently the same man—fishing; it showed him lifting a huge black fish from the water. That was where the black glaze which Mali objected to came in: the enormous fish. The next panel he could not see. Coral blocked his view. But something came after the lifting up of the giant black fish. Lifting the fish was not the end. There was at least one more panel and perhaps two.

"This is a flambé glaze," Joe said absently. "As I said before, of reduced copper. But in some places it looks almost like ‘dead leaf' glaze; if I didn't know better I'd—"

"You pedantic fop," Mali said savagely. "You miserable nitwit. I'm going up." She kicked away, rose, unfastened the cable which connected them, and was soon gone, her torch flashing above him. He found himself alone with the pot and the nearby Black Cathedral. Silence. And the utter abstention of activity. No fish moved near him; they seemed to shun the Black Cathedral and its environs. They are wise, he decided. As is Mali.

He took one last, long, lonely look at the dead structure, the cathedral which had never been alive.

Bending over the pot he took hold with both hands and tugged mightily, his torch temporarily put aside. The pot broke into many pieces; the pieces drifted away in the ocean currents and he found himself gazing down at the few stillimprisoned fragments.

Bracing himself he grasped a remaining fragment and tore it forward, where the whole pot had been. The consolidated coral hung back; it kept its seizure of the fragment active. And then, by degrees, the coral released the fragment. It came loose in his hands, and at once he flailed for the surface above.

He held in his hand the remaining two panels of the visual narrative. They ascended with him, held tight.

Presently he broke through to the surface. He slid aside his mask, and floating about, examined the two panels by torch light.

"What is it?" Mali called, swimming toward him with long, lean strokes.

"The rest of the pot," he said raspingly.

The first panel showed the great black fish swallowing the man who had caught it. The second—and final—panel revealed the great fish once again. This time it devoured and absorbed a Glimmung... or rather the Glimmung. Both the man and Glimmung disappeared down the throat of the fish, to be decomposed within its stomach. The man and Glimmung ceased. Only the great black fish remained. It had engulfed all.

"This potsherd—" he began, and then broke off. There was something that he had failed to see at first glance. That something now gathered his attention; it tugged at him, drawing him restlessly, impotently toward it.

In the latter panel a talk balloon had been incised above the fish's head. Words filled the talk balloon, words in his own language. He read them haltingly as he bobbed about upon the uneasy water.

Life on this planet is under water, not on the land. Do not get involved with the fat fake calling himself Glimmung. The depths draw from the earth, and within those depths the real Glimmung can be found.

And then, in very small letters, these words at the edge of the terminal panel.

This has been a public-service message.

"It's insane," Joe said, as Mali swam up beside him. He felt like dropping the fragment of pot, letting it drift down and down into the dark, heavy water, out of sight once more.

Peering over his shoulder, clinging roundly and wetly to him, Mali read the contents of the talk balloon. "Good god," she said, and laughed. "It's like that what is it you have on Earth. Cookies. With messages in them."

"Fortune cookies," Joe said savagely.

"I read where someone in a Chinese restaurant on Earth, in the city San Francisco, opened a fortune cookie and the slip said, ‘Abstain from fornication.' "Again she laughed, a warm, throaty laugh; at the same time she clutched at his shoulder, turning herself about so that she faced him. Now all at once she became calm. And very serious. "It's going to make a terrible fight," she said. "To keep the cathedral down there."

Joe said, "_It_ doesn't want to come up. The cathedral—it wants to stay down there. This shard is a part of it." He dropped the fragment of pot and at once it sank into oblivion below him; he watched for a second, saw only ebbing water, and then turned back toward Mali once again. "That was the cathedral talking to us," he said. It was a somber thought, a thought he did not like.

"Didn't the pot belong to the Black—"

"No," he said. "Not from the Black one." It had to be faced by all of them, himself, the others, and—Glimmung. "I don't think he knows," Joe said aloud. "It's not merely a question of the Book of the Kalends, what they write as fate. It's not a problem in hydraulic engineering either."

"The soul," Mali said faintly.

"What?" he demanded, with anger.

"I guess I don't mean that," Mali said after a pause.

"You're damn right you don't," Joe said. "Because it's not alive." Despite the message on the potsherd, he said to himself. It's the semblance of life only. Inertia. Like any physical object it remains where it's at until enough force is brought to bear against it... and then it moves, reluctantly. Below us, he thought, that cathedral contains a mass of infinite enormity, and we will break ourselves trying to move it. We will never recover, none of us, Glimmung included. And--.

It will remain down there, he thought. As it is now. World without end, he thought, as they say in the church. But what a strange cathedral, he thought, to scratch messages on coralencrusted pots. There must be a better way by which it can communicate to us up here, we who live on the land. And yet... Glimmung's way of communicating, his note bobbing around in the water closet of a toilet on Earth... that had been equally bizarre. A planetwide propensity, he decided. An ethnic custom, probably sanctioned down through centuries.

Mali said, "It knew you would find that pot."

"How?"

"In the Book of the Kalends. Buried somewhere in a footnote halfway through, in squirrel agate type."

"But for example they were wrong," Joe said, "when they said I would find something in Heldscalla that would cause me to kill Glimmung. So it could only be a guess, and maybe a bad one." Yet, he thought, it did work out. I did find the pot.

And maybe someday, he thought, the tidal currents of reality will sweep Glimmung and me along so that, at last, I kill him. If enough time elapses. In fact, he reflected, if enough time passes everything will happen. Which in a sense was the way the Kalends' Book worked.

Worked—and did not work.

Probability, Joe said to himself. A science in itself. Bernoulli's Theorem, the Bayes-Laplace theorem, the Poisson Distribution, Negative Binomial Distribution... coins and cards and birthdays, and at last random variables. And, hanging over it all, the brooding specter of Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, the Vienna Circle of philosophy and the rise of symbolic logic. A muddy world, in which he did not quite care to involve himself. In spite of the fact that it pertained immediately to the Book of the Kalends. Muddier by far than the water realm which lapped at him and Mali.

"Let's get back to the installation," Mali said, and shivered. She abruptly paddled off, leaving him; he saw, ahead of her, the lights which the robot Willis had previously turned on for their benefit. Those lights still burned; the robot waited for them.

Amalita did not get us, Joe reflected as the two of them paddled toward the staging center with its blaze of lights. And for that he was thankful. It had been as awful as Willis—and Mali—had said. His own corpse... he could still see, in his mind, the exposed jawbone as it waggled, white and dead in the current of the Aquatic Sub-World. Amalita's world, with its own laws. Filled with refuse and everything half dead.

He reached the illuminated staging area with its three hermetically sealed domes. And there was Willis, waiting to help him up.

The robot seemed irritable as Joe and Mali removed their diving gear. "It's about time, Sir and Lady," Willis said fussily as it gathered up their equipment. "You disobeyed me and stayed too long." It corrected itself. "Disobeyed Glimmung, I mean."

Joe said, "What's the matter with you?"

"Oh, a goddam radio station," Willis said; now it worked with Mali's oxygen tanks. Its strong hands lifted them without effort. "Just consider this." It stripped her suit from her, gathered up everything, and began to lug it toward the supply locker. "I'm sitting here waiting for you to come up and listening to the radio. They're playing Beethoven's ‘Ninth.' Then there's a commercial for a hernia belt. Then the Good Friday music from Wagner's Parsifal. Then an ad for an ointment that cures athlete's foot. Then a chorale from the Bach cantata Jesu Du Meine Seele. Then an ad for a rectal suppository used in the treatment of piles. Then Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. Then an ad for a false-teeth dentifrice. Then the ‘Sanctus' from the Verdi Requiem. Then a laxative ad. Then the ‘Gloria' section from Haydn's Mass in Time of War. Then an ad for an analgesic used for female monthly disorders. Then a chorale from the Saint Matthew Passion. Then an ad for cat litter. Then—" Abruptly the robot ceased speaking. It tilted its head, as if listening.

And now Joe heard it. And, beside him, Mali seemed to have heard it, too; she turned swiftly, then loped to the building's entrance. Outside, in the meager light, she peered up.

He followed after her. So did Willis.

A huge bird hung in the night sky, containing two hoops: one of water, one of fire. Within the two an adolescent female face gazed out, partially covered by its Paisley shawl. Glimmung, as he had first appeared to Joe, yet now elevated into an enormous bird form. An eagle, Joe thought wonderingly. Screaming as it came, ploughing up the nocturnal sky with its talons. He moved backward a space, into the security of the building's doorway. And still the great bird soared toward them, the right-angle hoops spinning with shrill intensity.

"It's the old fellow," Willis said, showing no anxiety. "I asked him to come. Or did he ask me? I forget. Anyhow the two of us conversed, but it's a little blurred, now, in my mind. We have that problem, my colleagues and I."

Mali said, "He's landing."

The bird came to rest in the air, its beak working in spastic agitation; the yellow eyes glowered at Joe—specifically at Joe and no one else—and then from the huge craw of the bird, words came, shouted into the darkness of the night. Words sharp and wild, a screech of interrogation. "_You_," the bird yelled at him. "I didn't want you to go into the ocean. I didn't want you to see what's there, buried at the bottom. You are here to cure pots. What did you see? What did you do?" The shrieks of the bird had a frantic quality about them, an overpowering urgency. Glimmung had come here because he could not wait to find out; he had to know at once what had happened at the ocean bottom.

"I found a pot," Joe said.

"The pot lied!" Glimmung shrieked. "Forget what it said; listen to me instead. Do you understand?"

Joe said, "The pot only told me—"

"There're a thousand lying pots down there," Glimmung broke in. "Each has a separate, false tale to tell to anyone who happens to come by and notice it."

"A great black fish," Joe said. "It showed that."

"There is no fish. Nothing is real down there except Heldscalla. I can bring it up any time; I can do it alone, with no help from you or from anyone. I can bring each pot up myself; I can free them one by one from the coral, and if they break I can repair them or get someone who can. Shall I send you back to your cubicle to play your game? To deteriorate over the years? To sink into decay gradually over the years until you become debris, without mind or plans? Is that what you want?"

"No," Joe said. "That's not what I want."

"You are going back to Terra," Glimmung shrilled; the beak snapped open and shut, open and shut, biting the air savagely.

"I'm sorry I—" Joe began, but the bird cut him off with ruthless fury. And, as before, with overwhelming agitation.

"I will return you to the crate in my basement," Glimmung declared. "You can stay there until the police catch up with you. Further, I will tell them where you are; they will get you and they will reduce you to tatters. Do you understand? Didn't it occur to you that if you disobeyed me I'd expel you? I have no use for you. As far as I am concerned you no longer exist. I'm sorry to yell at you this way, but this is the way I get when I'm thoroughly teed off. You'll have to excuse me."

Joe said, "It seems to me you're going overboard. What in fact have I done? I went below; I found a pot; I—"

"You found the pot I didn't want you to see." The frigid eyes of the bird bored relentlessly, stultifyingly down at him. "Don't you see what you've done? You've forced my hand. I have to react now; I can't wait!" All at once the bird wheeled upward, spinning and realigning itself, turned now toward the sea, rather than Joe. The bird shot outward, at tremendous velocity; its massive wings flapped with violent rage and the bird soared, rose, and hovered. It hung in the sky above the sea, shrieking in wild, determined bursts of ear-piercing noise. "Cavorting Cary Karns and his six phones won't help you now!" the bird shrilled as it hung in the dark sky, merging with the fog which rolled in, like waves, above the ocean surface. "The radio audience doesn't know about you! The radio audience doesn't care about you!" The bird wheeled, dropped lower...

Something rose from the sea.