The River Wall (23 page)

I tried to dispel the vision of Doral with images of the females, the cubs, the families who had visibly healed as they had traveled southward with us. The sha’um had considerable native intelligence. Even unstimulated by a mindlink with a Gandalaran, they were capable, I was now convinced, of understanding that they had been sick in the Valley, and were well outside of it. We might lose a few whose instincts for home were paramount, but I felt confident that most of them would stay close by—some out of fatigue; some, perhaps, out of curiosity.

The good thoughts relaxed me, but just before I drifted into an exhausted sleep, I saw again a swift and fleeting vision of a tawny coat flashing into sight between rocks, of a beloved friend fleeing to his doom.

I woke suddenly, my heart pounding. Someone was squatting next to me, the barest silhouette visible in the darkness. A hand was touching my shoulder, and an almost inaudible voice whispered: “Come outside.”

The shape stood up. I heard, rather than saw, it move through the bedroom doorway. I heard the difference in the step when he left the tiled floor of the house and stepped softly on the dirt.

Whoever he is
, I thought,
he didn’t alarm Keeshah, which means he’s a friend. And if he had wanted Tarani awake, he would have woken both of us.
I listened for a moment to Tarani’s even breathing, then made up my mind. I got up quietly, grabbed the light woven cover we seldom used, folded it and wrapped it around my waist. Then I went outside to see the person who had come to us with such an air of mystery.

The moon was setting, the silvery light that pervaded the Gandalaran night was fading swiftly. But I could see, from the doorway of the house, what I could not have sworn to from that brief whisper—my visitor was a man. He stood for a moment facing away from me, watching the tiny waterfall of the stream in which Tarani and I had bathed. Then he turned around.

It was Dharak.

And yet it was not Dharak. This was not the strong and gentle, privately uncertain Lieutenant I had known before Doral had left Thagorn. Nor was it the empty shell, the blank-faced body which had lived in silence in Shola’s home for the past few months.

The man was giving off an aura that reminded me of the look I had seen so briefly in Dharak’s eyes in the Great Hall. His posture, his positioning, the tension evident in his silhouette—I could almost smell his fear. He looked, for all the world, like a wild thing poised to bolt at the slightest sign of aggression.

I had not been wrong about seeing some intelligence in him before, and in the Great Hall. But I had assumed it was the old Dharak, trying to break out.
I was wrong, so wrong
, I thought pityingly.
The strain snapped him. Amnesia, insanity, something—he’s not the Dharak I knew.

But he is still
, I thought with determination,
the Lieutenants father, and he needs my help. For some reason—probably a lingering memory—he has let only me see the truth. I have to try not to scare him, to win his trust.

My heart was grieving for the old man as I stepped cautiously out of the doorway, into the fading moonlight. “Your name is Dharak,” I said quietly, “and mine is Rikardon. We are friends. Please, don’t be afraid of me.”

I extended my hand toward him—slowly, as the first woman had done toward the frightened female sha’um. He sidled away and I froze, unwilling to frighten him further. He hesitated, then seemed to come to a decision. In amazement I watched him straighten up and step toward me with a strong, confident bearing. He took my arm in a forearm-to-forearm grasp, and held it firmly.

“I know who you are, my friend, because those around me have spoken of you. I know, too, from the leadership you have offered the Sharith and from this personal demonstration of your kindness that you are a fine and good man. But I must tell you that your friend Dharak is no longer here. He has chosen to pass to a different existence, and in his absence I seem to be using his physical self—something that I believe you understand very well.”

Shock held me silent for a moment, then in a wave of primordial panic, I let go the stranger’s arm and fumbled for the scissor-shaped scrapers on the ledge above the chimneyed lamp mounted on the wall beside the door. Frantically, I snapped the tiny chip of iron against the flint until a spark ignited the candle wick; then I replaced the chimney, put the sparker down, and pulled the man I had known as Dharak into the circle of light around the lamp.

I stared into the mans eyes and knew that he meant nothing so simple as schizophrenia. “You’re a Visitor?” I whispered incredulously, and his direct gaze began to waver.

“Are you not also? It is what I have heard, what Dharak believed. Was he wrong?” I heard the unspoken, clearly implied question: Had I lied to Dharak?

“I am a Visitor—of a sort,” I admitted, astonished that I was willing to admit that to a virtual stranger when I had not felt able even to hint at the truth to any native of Gandalara—not even to Tarani, before she had learned of and been reconciled to her own “extra” personality, Antonia Alderuccio.

The man who had begun to look less and less like Dharak as I concentrated on expression, rather than appearance, frowned in puzzlement. “There are different kinds?” he asked.

“There are at least two,” I answered obscurely, “but that doesn’t matter right now. You must tell me where you come from.”

He frowned again, and it impressed me that he picked up the significance of my question. “You demand my origin, but not my identity? Something is very strange about you, my friend, but I will hide nothing from you. I come from … Raithskar.”

There was just the slightest hesitation before he spoke the city’s name. So slight as to be almost unnoticeable, but I detected it, and it set into motion a rattle-crack chain of pieces falling into place in my mind. The spooky fear I had felt that yet someone else from Ricardo’s world had been slammed unprepared into Gandalara was gone. I had suffered through that experience, and knew that the new person had not had sufficient time, yet, to lie so nearly perfectly. Yet if this person were a Gandalaran native from another time, why would he hesitate to give the name of his home? I had the sense that he had not lied, but that he had considered and chosen among alternatives.

It was a hunch, all the way, but it felt so enormously
right
that I could not, as much as I might have wanted to, refuse to believe it. I dropped my hands from the man’s shoulders and backed away from him.

“You mean Kä,” I said, barely able to whisper the words. “Raithskar was only your first home. You’re Zanek.”

The distance growing between us was not only my fault. Dharak, too, took a step backward. “How do you
know
me?” he demanded in a whisper.

“He has touched you,” said a voice to my left, “as have I. None who have done so could forget you, or fail to recognize you.”

Tarani stepped out into the lamplight, her legs bare beneath a hastily donned desert tunic—mine, judging from its ill fit.

“I was sleeping, and I heard in your voice, in Dharak’s tones, the essence of a different man. The difference woke me, and in Rikardon’s recognition came my own. Zanek, First King,” she said, and she faltered, for a moment showing the youth that was always hidden beneath her poise, “we are … honored.”

“And I,” said Zanek through Dharak’s voice, stepping forward with obvious relief, “am bewildered. I have so many questions, such a need for knowledge.” Suddenly, firmly, he grabbed one of my hands and one of Tarani’s. “I must know this first, my friends.
Are you the ones who will save us all?
“

Tarani looked at me in amazement, and I said: “Uh …”

Tarani shifted her arm so that she was holding Zanek’s hand. “Come inside,” she said. “There are more questions than answers, I fear, and our discussion will take some time.”

“Dharak was aware that you are a Visitor, Rikardon, but had no such knowledge about you, Tarani.” We had just barely settled in wood-and-cloth armchairs around a small table, on which there was a lamp, a ceramic pitcher of faen, and three drinking cups. “If you recognized me so readily, I should think you would be familiar to me, yet I cannot place you. Who are—perhaps the better phrase is, who
were
you, and from where do you know me?”

“I knew it,” I said, with real satisfaction, slapping the arm of my chair and startling the other two. “The All-Mind is
not
the surviving place of your people, Tarani, it is merely their memories. A recording of the lives they lived—not their personalities.”

“That is the interpretation to which I have always leaned,” Tarani admitted, “but this does, indeed, provide proof.”

Zanek had followed our words, and proved his sharpness by his next comment. “You met my memories in the
All-Mind?
” he asked. “How is that possible?”

“I am a Recorder,” Tarani said, but Zanek merely looked blank. “It is a version of the mindskill developed after your lifetime,” she said, then added: “or Serkajon’s.”

The man seated across from me flinched violently. “You know that I was a Visitor to Serkajon?” he whispered. “Have I no secrets from you?”

“Lots,” I broke in. “To begin with, if it wasn’t really you we met in the All-Mind, but only your memories, where
have
you been? And why have you come back now?”

The white-haired old man looked at me sharply. “Would you ask me that,” he wondered aloud, “if you had come from the same place as I? Would you not already know that it is a state of being, a place of contentment and peace, a place of oneness and individuality, no concerns and yet awareness?

“I came back, as I did with Serkajon, because I had a sense that I was needed. The difference, this time, lies in the nature of the vessel. Serkajon invited and welcomed me—it was his need, in fact, which drew me back into the world. Dharak, however, merely offered his consent. This time, the need to return was my own. I
have
to know what is happening.”

“Could you not see it from your—from the other place?” Tarani asked.

Zanek shook his head.

“Not in detail. We can—the word is not
see
, you understand—” Tarani and I both nodded. “We can ‘see’ the All-Mind, but cannot touch it as the—’Recorder,’ did you say?” Again, Tarani nodded. “We cannot touch and read and see into the All-Mind as you have done, as a Recorder can do. We
can
rejoin the ebb and flow of life that creates the memories which are stored there, but we cannot reach into past lives—not to read, not to change. Even if that were possible, it would have been no use to me. The All-Mind performed its service when it alerted me to the danger.”

“What danger?” I demanded, leaning forward out of my chair. “Do you mean Ferrathyn? The Ra’ira? The sha’um?
What do you mean?
“

“I wish I knew,” he shot back, angry and sincere. “The nature of the danger is what I hoped to learn from you. I only know of its consequences.”

“What consequences?” I demanded.

He hesitated. “You must realize that there is no
time
in the place of my existence,” he began. “And there is some part of me still there, which was never a part of this world, and does not return to it with me. As an entire being, I made the choice to return. But”—he gestured helplessly—“as merely Zanek, borrowing the body of Dharak, I do not have the knowledge or the memory of the entire being.”

“What consequences?” I asked again, the kernel of a hunch gathering itself somewhere in my gut, getting ready to punch me in the stomach.

“I am trying to tell you that I do not know the full answer to that. When I awoke here, I had only two memories related to why I am here. First, there is an image of the All-Mind, growing and expanding from its beginning, spreading with the growth of Gandalara, always enlarging.”

“Like a swelling sphere,” Tarani said, her voice soft, her gaze unfocused, “surrounded by a formless, lightlike energy which coalesces into interconnected columns to hold the lifememories of those who have lived, and then their children, and then their grandchildren. The energy recedes as the process continues, and the sphere extends itself to the border of the energy.”

“I would not have stated it so,” Zanek said in a hushed voice, “but that describes it excellently. You have touched it indeed, my lady. I respect your skill, and would learn more of it.”

Tarani’s eyes focused on Dharak. “It was my skill,” she said, “but not my vision. Rikardon saw it that way, and it seems the truest image I have encountered.”

“And the second memory?” I interrupted, the hunch nagging me for more information. “You said you had two memories.”

“I have not finished with the first, my friend,” Zanek said. “Using your own image, I remembered watching the sphere grow, and I saw it stop growing. Abruptly. Completely.” He rubbed a hand across his face. “Do you understand me, my friends?” he asked. “I saw the death of Gandalara. No more lifememories forming because no more lives were being created. Everything ended.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, to stare into the candle flame. “I have said that there is no sense of time in that other existence,” he said, “and I have also said that we cannot touch or read the All-Mind. Yet both things are, in some ways, untrue.

“Did I not touch and influence Serkajon before his lifememory had been resigned to the All-Mind? Yet I could ‘see’ but
not
touch the completed, ended All-Mind, which contained Serkajon’s lifememory, which in turn contained evidence of my touch.” He shook his head. “It is a paradox which eludes me,” he said, then sighed and sat back. “And it is happening again.”

Tarani was quicker than I to see what he meant.

“You have seen Dharak’s lifememory in the All-Mind,” she said, “and yet you are part of it now. That must mean,” she said eagerly, “that the ending you saw is beyond the end of Dharak’s lifespan. Is that true?”

“True,” he said, but his tone of voice was not encouraging. “That brings up the second memory I retain. I know that I have come back close to the end. There will be a sudden expansion of the All-Mind in this generation, and a consistent dwindling thereafter.”