Timothy Zahn - Cascade Point

"How come?" Javier hesitated. This was not the time nor the place, he told himself. But the secret had been bottled up within him for too long. "Wonky, have you wondered how it is I can get these visions, wondered what it is that causes them?"

"Naw, not really. Mr. Schultz said it's a kinda curse."

"It is indeed. But it's a curse with a very simple basis." He closed his eyes briefly. "Death."

Wonky's eyes narrowed. "I don't get it."

"It's painfully simple. Someone fairly nearby dies, and that event triggers a vision. That's what happened at the station—the train wreck started a trance, and I got trampled. At the hospital, with crash victims and others dying all around me, I got visions' strung together like previews of Armageddon."

He stood up and went to the window. "It was the group trances on Aurora that finally tipped me off," he said, as much to himself as to Wonky. If felt good to finally let it all out. "Always there was one death in the obit list that wasn't connected to the accidents—that was the death that started the whole thing. A few Cassandras would be affected; one, maybe, would be driving a car and would run down a pedestrian. Another death, more trances. With enough Cassandras doing dangerous things it could have gone on forever." He sighed. "I think the old philosophers must have been right. Human life—maybe sentient life in general—is more important to the universe than we like to think these days. Somehow, the two instances of death—the triggering one and the ones in the vision—seem to form a link through time and space, a bridge that we Cassandras can somehow travel. Maybe because death takes the person out of time, so that all deaths are in some way congruent—I don't know. All I know is that it happens. The philosophers can play games with the semantics."

Wonky had been listening silently—probably, Javier thought, not really understanding. But now he spoke up. "Wait a minute. Mr. Schultz and you both said that most of the things you see don't ever happen. So what's this bridge thing you're talking about?"

Javier didn't turn around. He didn't want Wonky to see his face. "Mr. Schultz is wrong, like the rest of us have been. Maybe we didn't want to believe it... but it's the only way this can possibly make sense. You see, just because a vision isn't fulfilled nearby doesn't mean it isn't fulfilled somewhere. We just never—I mean, there are just too many worlds out there that we don't hear much from." He bit his lip. "As I was getting dressed at the hospital I heard a report that had come in from Centauri, saying somebody important had been killed in an aircar crash. They gave enough details that... well, I saw the crash, Wonky, saw it almost a week ago. But if that VIP hadn't been in it, I'd still think the vision hadn't come true."

He turned back to face Wonky. "No, Wonky. Every one of those damnable visions must come true. Maybe some of them haven't, yet. But they will."

He stopped; not necessarily waiting for a response, but simply out of words. "I don't get it all," Wonky said slowly. "But I guess you know what you're talking about. You're a lot smarter than me, anyway." He hesitated, then stood up and held out his hand. "Good luck."

A few minutes later Javier was back on the street, trudging toward the tube with his travelbags. He walked mechanically, only dimly aware of his surroundings, his mind numbed by emotional fatigue. On the way he dropped his letter in a mailbox; Dr. Rayburn would receive it in a day or two.

Wonky hadn't understood, of course. How could he? To know someone had died each time you were awarded the dubious privilege of watching someone else die—it was too far out of his experience. And he probably wouldn't have been able to live with the idea if he had understood it.

For Javier, though, there was no escape, either from the knowledge or its consequences. He could leave the city now, but he knew he'd have to return. Even if Dr. Rayburn believed him, experiments and massive data searches would have to be performed to prove it to the rest of humanity. And that would be only the beginning, because the ultimate goal was still to control the trances and their side effects. More experiments would have to be done, experiments like the ones that had nearly destroyed Melynn Uhland and her friends. It would require more volunteer Cassandras... and Javier knew who the first of those would have to be.

Himself.

The thought of it was terrifying—his hospital experience multiplied by a hundred. But he had no choice. The truth had to be told; the Cassandras had to learn, at whatever cost, how to use their curse.

Because Earth was going to need all the resources she could muster. Glancing involuntarily at the sky, Javier shivered as he remembered that terrible hospital vision. Somewhere out there, sometime in the future, a war fleet powerful enough and vicious enough to burn off an entire planet was going to win a great victory. If the race that owned that fleet was expanding their own empire into space, they would someday reach the Colonia... perhaps very soon.

And if the cost of developing the Cassandra ability into a weapon against that threat was enhanced public hatred and the loss of a few lives, then so be it. It would, Javier knew, be worth such a price.

Even if one of those lives was his own.

Afterword

"The Cassandra" was one of those stories that I simply couldn't let go of, no matter how many rejection slips it collected. From 1979 to 1983 it underwent two complete rewrites and quite a bit of incidental fiddling on top of that. Eventually, the persistence paid off.

Why I pushed the thing so hard is a little more difficult to explain. Certainly it's not a particularly upbeat story (and if you've made it this far you've surely noticed my fondness for upbeat stories); in fact, it almost qualifies as a tragedy. And, unlike the case in many of my stories, I would emphatically NOT want to be in the protagonists shoes.

All I can suggest is that it was the story's underlying philosophy that had a grip on me. In an era where mankind too often considers itself to be a meaningless accident of nature, perhaps I needed to remind people that that wasn't necessarily so. We could just as easily be important—even vital—to the universe at large; and until and unless that's proven wrong, I intend to keep on believing it. You can't very well care about people, after all, unless you feel those people are ultimately worth the effort.

I wax overly philosophical. Let's get to the next story.

Scholars and doomsayers had been predicting the Great War for almost a century beforehand, and when it finally came it was brief and furious, erupting like a fusion bomb among the sixty worlds of the Empire. The more strategic planets were fought over by as many as seven separate factions, and were often reduced to rubble in the process. Other planets—the poor or unimportant ones—were largely neglected by the starfleets, and were left to their individual fates as space travel all but disappeared.

Power, not the destruction of civilization, was the goal of those in the struggle; but, too late, they realized they were in over their heads. For although each faction had carefully calculated its strength and chances before making its move, none had anticipated the wild-card effect of the Dragonmasters who had suddenly appeared from nowhere onto the scene. These twelve men—virtual unknowns, all of them—had no warships and only minimal troops. But the powerful nightmare shapes that were their dragons evened the odds tremendously. Huge, virtually indestructible, appearing and vanishing on command, the dragons wreaked havoc on any ground forces that opposed their masters, crushing soldier and armored treader with equal ease.

Their size and sheer impossibility inspired almost universal fear and hatred, but it also prompted new alliances and betrayals among the warring factions as each tried to guess who the ultimate victor would be. But the forces unleashed were too destructive and the scramble for power quickly became a fight for survival. For many, even this goal was not to be achieved.