The River Wall Read online

  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 seco
nd 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.”

  “An expansion of the All-Mind?” I asked. “Oh, no—the All-Mind grows only with the death of Gandalarans. You mean that a lot of people will die, don’t you?” The hunch twisted restively, almost ready to cast its blow. I stood up, and began to pace around the room.

  “That fits with Ferrathyn,” I said. “Your being here fits with him having the Ra’ira—you’ve been connected with it from the beginning. But the death of the race? Surely that’s not Ferrathyn’s aim. How can an egomaniac have power if there is no one to control?”

  “It must be connected,” Tarani said. “Zanek, you are sure—it begins now?”

  I whirled to look at the old man as he nodded, and the hunch clobbered me so hard that I reeled back physically.

  “Your very first question,” I reminded him, crossing the floor toward him in a stealthy crouch. I was barely breathing. “You wanted to know if we were the ones.”

  The man leaned back in his chair, lifting his arms in a gesture of warding off, of protecting.

  “You didn’t come back just to watch it all end, did you?” I said angrily. “You think there’s hope, and you think so because you did something. You reached into another world, and you tore us loose, and you dragged us here, without warning us or telling us or helping us.”

  I leaned over the chair, just barely keeping my hands from closing on the man’s throat, because some kernel of reason was whispering: He made you young again. He gave you new life.

  “Its my turn for a question, Zanek, a question I’ve asked myself a thousand times in the past months. Why me? Why Ricardo Carillo, a teacher, and Antonia Alderuccio, a sweet, elegant young woman. Why us? Why?“

  20

  “I do not know why,” he shouted back at me. “I do not know who you are, where you come from, how you came here.” His words rang with such sincerity that I felt myself backing off. He came forward in his chair, speaking earnestly. “I only know that when I realized that what I was seeing was the death of Gandalara, of the people I cherished and protected, to whom I gave hope at the beginning of the Kingdom, who suffered from the corruption of that hope at the end of the Kingdom—when I saw that it was all for nothing, it would end in nothingness, that Gandalara would die …”

  He closed his eyes briefly, and took a deep breath.

  “I grieved. In that place of contentment, that existence of apartness, there was only restlessness and sadness. I could see the death, but not what caused it. I wanted desperately to be able to understand, to help, to prevent. It was a wish so strong, my friends”—he paused to breathe deeply again—“a wish so strong that it seemed to take form, and—yes, in reply to my wish, something happened. As you put it, I did something. I knew I had done something, but when I looked at the All-Mind, I saw no change.

  “It was at that moment that I knew I must return,” he said. “Dharak’s illness was a convenience for me—I maintained the fiction of being stunned, and listened to everything.”

  “You heard Thymas wishing for his fathers help,” I said slowly. “Before we left Thagorn last time, you heard us talking—it was you who looked at me that day.”

  “It was I,” Zanek admitted. “And that was the first day I began to understand that you were different from all others. I could not be sure, then, that you were the hope and not the cause. It is only now, after I have seen you struggle for the survival of the sha’um and, thus, for the Sharith, after I have seen your respect for life, your strength, your unusual knowledge—”

  He stopped, struck by a thought.

  “What did you say, earlier? You are from … ‘another world’? How can that be? There is only Gandalara.”

  “How can you believe that?” Tarani asked. “That place where part of you continues to exist—can you not see all worlds, all time from that place?”

  “Can I?” he asked, bewildered. “I—that knowledge did not return with me, if I have it.” He stood up, suddenly excited. “But it makes perfect sense, and fits in with the few memories I have. I recall despairing as I looked on the immobile All-Mind. When Gandalara was divided by dispute and greed, I held in my hands the power to help. With the Ra’ira as my secret, my benevolent weapon, I brought people together, instructed them in the concept of sharing, and of the welfare of one being the concern of all. I devoted my first, only true lifetime to that task, and I saw it as nothing less than preservation of Gandalara.

  “When Serkajon saw how my vision had failed the future generations, I knew that I had the knowledge, the power to be of service once again, and I took the action I knew to be right—again, with the goal of preserving something good and worth saving.

  “But when I saw this new danger, I knew I was helpless to serve again in any meaningful way. I was plagued with doubt, in fact, that my earlier efforts had been in vain—or worse, that I had unknowingly created whatever situation would result in the utter destruction of Gandalara. When I wished for help, I wished for knowledge and insight beyond my own limits. I wanted something or someone to see everything clearly, to know what was happening, to know what to do about it.

  “And I see, now, that I could not have wished for a Gandalaran, any Gandalaran.” He offered me both his hands. “More than I can tell you, I regret that you were drawn here against your will, your own life destroyed,” he said. “I tell you again, it was not my conscious choice, I would not have done this harm to you deliberately, even if it meant Gandalara must truly die. But I see the goodness of what you have done already, and I know that, however this occurred, you were well chosen for this task.

  “You have the knowledge that is needed. Who else—what Gandalaran—could have seen the danger to the sha’um, and taken such quick action to prevent it?”

  “He is right,” Tarani said, standing up and extending her hands to touch our joined hands. “How often have we said that to one another, Rikardon—that it is our difference which is so important to our destiny?”

  “Destiny?” Zanek repeated. “Then you know? You know what is to happen, why you are here?”

  “We know some things,” I admitted reluctantly, and pulled my hands from the three-way joining. I moved closer to the table and poured faen into the three drinking cups. I handed Tarani one, Zanek another, then took up the third as I sat back down in my chair. “Forgive me my anger,” I said. “The few things we do know we have found out in small pieces, never enough to make sense. It still doesn’t make sense,” I said,
letting my frustration show.

  “Perhaps,” Tarani said, taking her seat again, “our difference has been inhibiting our full understanding. Each of us,” she said, gesturing in particular to Zanek/Dharak, “has a different kind of knowledge. Let us each share it, and perhaps together we can find the answers.”

  “Tell me first,” Zanek said, “of the Ra’ira. You mentioned it, and a man’s name—Ferra …?”

  “Ferrathyn,” I said wearily. “Look, I’m having trouble trying to keep straight what you know as Zanek, and what you may know from Dharak’s memories, and what I did or didn’t have time to tell Dharak. It seems the long way around, I know, but why don’t Tarani and I tell you our story, as it has happened from the start? Maybe you can find your answers along the way—and maybe the retelling will jar something loose we haven’t seen before.”

  “That is an excellent plan,” Zanek said, and raised his cup in a salute to each of us. “I will not interrupt with questions, unless I truly fail to understand your words. And I fully expect to be fascinated.”

  It was dawn, and I had walked outside the house to stretch, watch the brilliant colors seep across the unblackened part of the sky, and wonder if I had dreamed the events of the night. It seemed incredible that Tarani and I had spent the past several hours telling a man from the dawn of history about the immediate past history of his world.

  I heard a rumbling to my right, and Keeshah came stretching out of the bushes, and stopped beside me. Without warning, he slammed his head into my stomach and levered me off the ground slightly, then he moved on past. I caught his tail as it slapped into my side and pulled lightly; he snatched it free and jumped ahead, looking back disdainfully.

  *Look silly, * he said, then walked to the stream for a drink.

  I looked down at myself, and realized that the action of his head against my midriff had broken loose the haphazard tucking of the bedcover I had continued to wear through the night. The cover had slipped off and puddled in a circle around my ankles. Otherwise, I was stark naked. I bent over to grab the cover, then jumped forward with a yelp as something cold touched my bare bottom. The cover caught my feet, and I sprawled face down in the dirt, my dignity badly damaged. A paw and a lot of weight slapped me down again as I tried to push my shoulders off the ground, and two young but well-grown sha’um used me for a doormat, ignoring the ungentle things I was calling out to them through our mindlink. The last paw left my back, and I rolled over furiously—only to see Yayshah looming over me, one paw lifted delicately.