The Steel of Raithskar (15 page)

“I think I understand.” And I was relieved. I wanted very much to think the best I could of Markasset. “It was more a forced loan than a theft.”

“Exactly.”

“And when did you learn about it?”

“After the excitement had died down a little over the
real
theft. I returned to my office, found the key there and the money missing.”

“He took your money. Do you think he might also have been involved with the men who stole the Ra’ira?”

“NO!”

At last, the question I had dreaded had been asked, and answered. Thanasset’s response was so immediate that I knew he had felt it hanging between us ever since I admitted that I knew little of Markasset’s life.

“I do not entirely understand my son,” Thanasset said, “but I know him. He would never betray me or Raithskar.”

Another great weight had lifted from me. I didn’t know much about Markasset, but I trusted his father. “I believe you,” I told him, and relief and gratitude showed in his strong, craggy face. “Who
did
take it?”

He shrugged. “You have heard all that I know. Ferrathyn’s theory about the Lords of Eddarta seems likely to me. But they would have needed information only available in Raithskar—someone here must have helped them. That is, if they really
did
take the Ra’ira to help support their claim as the heirs of the ancient Kings of Gandalara.”

“Tell me about them,” I said. “The Kings of Gandalara.” Thanasset’s face took on a look of complete astonishment. I must have had the same look on my face as he suddenly stood up and bowed deeply before me.

“I am fortunate,” he said. “If you know nothing of the Kings, you are one of the Very Ancients. And if you have no knowledge of Kä, then—” he paused, “you must not know about Steel.”

I knew about “steel” in my world—but “Steel” in Gandalara was a mystery, especially as it was spoken by Thanasset. I could hear the capital “S” in his voice. I shook my head, though what he said had not been a question.

“Come with me,” he said, and led the way out into the large central room. We walked over to the inlaid wall with the beautifully intricate sha’um pattern, and he pointed to the sword mounted on the wall above it.

“That is Steel,” he said. “Its name is—” He stopped suddenly, and turned toward me. His voice was almost a whisper. “I should have known. Its name is
Rika.
Upwards.”

I said nothing as he looked back at the sword and stared at it thoughtfully for several seconds.

“That sword was forged for Serkajon. It is one of the few swords in the world made of the Most Precious Metal.” It was another Gandalaran term for Steel. “They stay strong and sharp for lifetimes of men, and they carry an imprint of the men who have wielded them.

“Serkajon was the first to hold
Rika.
In the generations since his death, it has been the duty of each father to judge whether his son was worthy to carry it. There have been only five, since Serkajon, strong enough in body and spirit that their touch on the hilt would not dishonor his memory.” He smiled. “You will be the sixth.”

Who, me? But …

Thanasset had turned away from the wall and was pacing slowly around the large room. I followed him, trying to think of something to say. But he was talking again.

“The Most Precious Metal came to Gandalara with the skybolt.” He raised his heavy brows as he glanced at me. “Even as ancient as you are, you must know the legend. Back, far back, long before the first
written
history, a starbolt struck down from the sky, blinding everyone near it, killing many of our ancestors.”

I bit my tongue; I had been about to remind him that if they had died, there was a strong possibility they
hadn’t
been his ancestors. And besides, the image he had given me recalled one of my own. A starbolt? A meteor, certainly. What else could it be? And I, Ricardo, had been killed by a meteor—or my body had. Yet that was in a different world. Why did it seem to me that the two events were linked?

“Yes,” I told Thanasset. “I know of the starbolt.”

He nodded. “I thought you would. The memory of it remains in the All-Mind, though dimly now. For it happened in the unthinkably remote past—a hundred hundred centuries ago.”

A million years
, I calculated.
And the All-Mind, whatever it is, still remembers it!

“It struck here,” he said, swinging one arm generally in the direction of the waterfall behind the city, “in what is now Raithskar. Some theorists believe that it brought the Most Precious Metal with it. Others say that the metal is a transformation product of its power. In either case,” he shrugged, “it remains the only known deposit of Steel in all Gandalara.” It seemed that the term for the finished metal was also applied to its main and indispensable ingredient: a chunk of nickel-iron meteor.

“Our Ancestors at that time were little more than animals, barely aware of their latent ability to think rationally and to anticipate the future. After the skybolt struck, those who survived began to use that ability. The trend was magnified threefold in their children, and, within two generations, the All-Mind had become fully aware.”

It all made sense.

A huge chrome-nickel-iron meteor had come smashing in through the atmosphere in the distant past at somewhere between ten and twenty miles per second. At those velocities, plenty of hard radiation is given off during the time it takes to go through the atmosphere—between ten seconds and two minutes, depending on the speed and the angle at which it struck. That radiation would be lethal to those creatures near enough to barely survive the impact, and disabling to those who caught a smaller dose. And it was certain to produce mutations—most of them probably unfavorable.

But at least one favorable mutation had survived, and its descendants mined and worked the very fabric of their beginnings when they forged swords like
Rika
from the Steel of Raithskar.

“And the All-Mind?” I asked. “You were going to tell me about it, just before Zaddorn arrived.”

“Yes, I was,” Thanasset agreed, then hesitated. Suddenly he chuckled. “You’ll have to forgive me, Rikardon. The All-Mind is so much a part of us now—I hardly know where to begin. But I’ll try.”

And so he did. We walked slowly around the beautiful parquet floor of the midhall as he talked, and I listened attentively, trying very hard to understand. But it was difficult. The meteor was a physical phenomenon which my world and Thanasset’s, no matter how far apart, could share. But there was nothing in Ricardos experience to help me now.

The concepts and vocabulary were strange to me—some of the terms Thanasset used simply had no equivalent meaning, and they were apparently so second-nature to Markasset that I got no help from his unreliable memory.

Besides, I don’t believe that Markasset understood the All-Mind. And Thanasset, who was trying his very best to explain it to me in simple, logical language, didn’t completely understand it, either. But both of them
accepted
it. For them, it was a basic fact of life.

But Ricardo Carillo had lived in a civilization where such notions were discounted by a large percentage of the intelligent population. Even those who did not discount them could not prove them. They could not even agree among themselves on terminology or basic theory.

But in spite of all the impediments to understanding, by the time Thanasset had finished, I did have a conception—my own, certainly, which probably didn’t match Thanasset’s—of what the All-Mind is.

The All-Mind is a
linkage
between Gandalarans. It is not precisely telepathic, but it seems to have some properties closely akin to telepathy. The Gandalarans believe that the All-Mind is the collective mind of all Gandalarans, both living and dead, with only a few exceptions.

They believe that each person is a new individual when he is born, but while he lives, and after he dies, his soul-mind (my word, not theirs) is part of the All-Mind, linked with it irrevocably, and so linked with every other Gandalaran, both living and dead. The webwork of those linkages, throughout the total four-dimensional space-time matrix which is the lifetime of the
race
, comprises the All-Mind.

I was surprised to find that Thanasset’s attitude toward the All-Mind was respectful, but not quite reverent. Certainly it was implicit in what he told me that he believed in the survival of the individual soul-mind after death through its linkage with the All-Mind. Yet the All-Mind was not a god to Thanasset.

The Gandalarans have no temples, no rites or ceremonies, nothing even faintly resembling what I would call “worship” directed to the All-Mind. Each Gandalaran admires and honors it above all entities which are alive in his world, for he knows that the All-Mind is a greater entity, and that he is a part of it. Thanasset admitted, with a look of mild disapproval, that some radical thinkers believed that the personality—what I would call the soul—of the individual died with his body, and that only the integrated memories remained linked to the All-Mind. But whatever the actual nature of the survival, all Gandalarans are certain of their place in the history of their world. They will be remembered.

I have no opinion to offer as to which theory is correct. But I do understand why, though their regard for the All-Mind is the closest thing Gandalarans have to a religion, they do not worship it.

Thanasset didn’t think of the All-Mind in the way I had been taught to think of God. I think it was Graham Greene who said something to the effect that he could not worship a God he could understand.

Gandalarans think they understand the All-Mind pretty well. They do not worship it, fear it, or try to win its favor. They do not even have faith in it or believe in it. It does not need faith or belief; it is merely a fact.

It is accessible.

Everyone is in continuous contact with the All-Mind. With most of them, however, that contact is largely subconscious. The few who can regularly operate that contact have a special duty in Gandalara. They are called Recorders, and it is their job to put explicit, carefully indexed knowledge into the memory of the All-Mind. And to tap it for stored knowledge.

In some ways the All-Mind functions like a giant computer-recorder. A non-Recorder can go to a Recorder to get information—history, law, customs, economics, and the like. From what Thanasset said, I got the impression that either the Recorder could establish his or her link and search out the information directly, or the inquirer could be put into something like an hypnotic state and his or her subconscious link could be raised to the conscious level.

Either way, it seemed, the answers weren’t always there. Either nobody knew it to begin with, or for some reason it just isn’t available.

In that one way, at least, the All-Mind resembles most of the deities I have ever heard of. It sees all, knows all, and tells what it damn well pleases.

When I said earlier that it was hard to understand what Thanasset was saying about the All-Mind, I omitted one large factor—part of the time I just wasn’t listening. My skepticism was functioning in high gear, and while it stewed over one point, Thanasset covered two more.

Which just goes to show the stubbornness of the human mind. Here was I, who should be dead, living out of my own time and world, in the body of another being who wasn’t even human—and I was discounting half of what Thanasset was saying because it seemed like the same sort of occult mysticism crap I’d laughed at all my life.

But if I gained little true understanding of the All-Mind from our discussion, at least I did realize at last why Thanasset treated me with such respect. To him, I was someone who had died long ago and had been an intimate part of the All-Mind—for how long?—and had come back or been returned by the All-Mind to a particular body for a particular purpose.

And that contributed to my skepticism, too. Because I couldn’t buy Thanasset’s theory about me. Rick Carillo of California, U.S.A., didn’t fit into the matrix of the All-Mind in any way, shape or form. No matter how logical, well-reasoned, self-evident, or even
true
Thanasset’s explanation had been up until that point,
I
tore a glaring hole in them.

What I believed, however, was far less important than what Thanasset believed. And that, at least, I could comprehend.

“If you know nothing of the Kings of Gandalara,” Thanasset was saying, “it indicates that your own life-span antedated them. Do you know anything of the City of Kä?”

“Nothing,” I admitted honestly. I didn’t feel that the conversation I had heard, crouching behind a bush out in the desert in the middle of the night, could even be counted.

“What do you remember of the Great
Pleth?
”

PSleth?
Markasset’s memories refused to translate it.

“I’m afraid I don’t know the word. Perhaps if you’d define it …”

“Ah, of course. It is little used these last twenty centuries. It is an extensive body of water. The Great Pleth was
very
extensive.”

Oh sure
, I thought.
A
sea!
I was relieved to be able to say, for once, “Yes, I understand now. The—uh, Pleth was quite extensive in my day.” I tried to frame a sentence which would say that I had even sailed the “pleth,” but the vocabulary would not come to mind. Apparently there was no Gandaresh word for “sail” or “boat.”

“Then you must come from some five hundred centuries in the past,” he said, with a touch of awe in his voice. “This must be a completely different world for you!”

“Oh, it’s all of that,” I agreed wholeheartedly. Then I paused and thought about it for a few seconds. “Yet it is much the same in many ways. People still live and die, love and hate, succeed and fail. And the reasons behind the actions of men—motivation, emotion—are the same here as in my world.”

Thanasset smiled sadly. “Do we progress so slowly, then? Are folk no more noble now than they were in your day?”

I realized that I had been speaking, thoughtlessly, of Ricardo’s world; yet Thanasset interpreted my words as applying to his own history. And that brought the point home sharply to me.