The Talisman

Jack moved slowly, filled with wonder, across the hardwood ballroom floor. He was looking up, his eyes sparkling. His face was bathed in a clear white radiance that was all colors—sunrise colors, sunset colors, rainbow colors. The Talisman hung in the air high above him, slowly revolving.

It was a crystal globe perhaps three feet in circumference—the corona of its glow was so brilliant it was impossible to tell exactly how big it was. Gracefully curving lines seemed to groove its surface, like lines of longitude and latitude . . . and why not? Jack thought, still in a deep daze of awe and amazement. It is the world—ALL worlds—in microcosm. More; it is the axis of all possible worlds.

Singing; turning; blazing.

He stood beneath it, bathed in its warmth and clear sense of well-meant force; he stood in a dream, feeling that force flow into him like the clear spring rain which awakens the hidden power in a billion tiny seeds. He felt a terrible joy lift through his conscious mind like a rocket, and Jack Sawyer lifted both hands over his upturned face, laughing, both in response to that joy and in imitation of its rise.

“Come to me, then!” he shouted,

                and slipped

                    (through? across?)

                        into

Jason.

“Come to me, then!” he shouted again in the sweetly liquid and slightly slippery tongue of the Territories—he cried it laughing, but tears coursed down his cheeks. And he understood that the quest had begun with the other boy and thus must end with him; so he let go and

                        slipped

                    back

                into

Jack Sawyer.

Above him, the Talisman trembled in the air, slowly turning, throwing off light and heat and a sensation of true goodness, of whiteness.

“Come to me!”

It began to descend through the air.

9

So, after many weeks, and hard adventuring, and darkness and despair; after friends found and friends lost again; after days of toil, and nights spent sleeping in damp haystacks; after facing the demons of dark places (not the least of which lived in the cleft of his own soul)—after all these things, it was in this wise that the Talisman came to Jack Sawyer:

He watched it come down, and while there was no desire to flee, he had an overwhelming sense of worlds at risk, worlds in the balance. Was the Jason-part of him real? Queen Laura’s son had been killed; he was a ghost whose name the people of the Territories swore by. Yet Jack decided he was. Jack’s quest for the Talisman, a quest that had been meant for Jason to fulfill, had made Jason live again for a little while—Jack really had a Twinner, at least of a sort. If Jason was a ghost, just as the knights had been ghosts, he might well disappear when that radiant, twirling globe touched his upstretched fingers. Jack would be killing him again.

Don’t worry, Jack, a voice whispered. That voice was warm and clear.

Down it came, a globe, a world, all worlds—it was glory and warmth, it was goodness, it was the coming-again of the white. And, as has always been with the white and must always be, it was dreadfully fragile.

As it came down, worlds reeled about his head. He did not seem to be crashing through layers of reality now but seeing an entire cosmos of realities, all overlapping one another, linked like a shirt of

(reality)

chain-mail.

You’re reaching up to hold a universe of worlds, a cosmos of good, Jack—this voice was his father’s. Don’t drop it, son. For Jason’s sake, don’t drop it.

Worlds upon worlds upon worlds, some gorgeous, some hellish, all of them for a moment illumined in the warm white light of this star that was a crystal globe chased with fine engraved lines. It came slowly down through the air toward Jack Sawyer’s trembling, outstretched fingers.

“Come to me!” he shouted to it as it had sung to him. “Come to me now!”

It was three feet above his hands, branding them with its soft, healing heat; now two; now one. It hesitated for a moment, rotating slowly, its axis slightly canted, and Jack could see the brilliant, shifting outlines of continents and oceans and ice-caps on its surface. It hesitated . . . and then slowly slipped down into the boy’s reaching hands.

43

News From Everywhere

1

Lily Cavanaugh, who had fallen into a fitful doze after imagining Jack’s voice somewhere below her, now sat bolt-upright in bed. For the first time in weeks bright color suffused her waxy yellow cheeks. Her eyes shone with a wild hope.

“Jason?” she gasped, and then frowned; that was not her son’s name. But in the dream from which she had just been startled awake she had had a son by such a name, and in that dream she had been someone else. It was the dope, of course. The dope had queered her dreams to a fare-thee-well.