The Steel of Raithskar (3 page)

The water was cool and had a pleasant flavor which I didn’t recognize at first. I realized as I finished the cup that it was brackish. There was salt in the water—enough, at least, to taste it.

The well must contain a trace of salt, I decided; that would hardly be surprising out here in the desert.

“I will go now to prepare your breakfast,” Keddan said, when he had placed pitcher and cups in a narrow recess cut from one of the blocks that formed an inside wall. “Is there any other service you desire?”

“No, thank you, Keddan. May I sit here and rest a little?”

“That would be good, Rider. When you are ready to water your sha’um, you have but to ask.” He pushed aside a tapestry which concealed a doorway and was gone.

I was glad to be alone. I had a lot to think about. And I was infinitely glad to be
able
to think again. The day before had been a jumble of confusion and exhaustion; an incoherent desperation had driven me across the desert. Yesterday I had only wanted to survive.

Today I wanted answers.
What the hell has happened to me? Where am I? Oh, I know
, I told myself impatiently,
in the Refreshment House of Yafnaar, among the Fa’aldu. And where does that get me?

Today, at least, I had a rational mind. I had defined the problem and could approach it logically. The first step: assemble all the facts I had—the facts, that is, as I understood them.

FACT ONE:
My name was Ricardo Emilio Carillo, lately of California.
All right, face the toughest one first. Do you mean “lately” or simply “late”?
Yesterday I had considered with utter detachment the possibility that I had died and arrived in Hell. Certainly I had believed, when the fireball was coming toward me, that I was about to die.

I had never thought much about the character of Hell—or, for that matter, of Heaven. But I had always assumed, I realized as I thought about it now, that I would
feel
very different. Whatever the place was like—either one—I should not feel as … well, as
alive.

And right now, with my head still dully throbbing, the hardness of the block beneath me intangible even through the thin padding, the pleasant salty taste of the water lingering in my mouth, I felt very much alive.

I made up my mind, then, to set aside the question of my death in another life. In
this
life, in
this
world, I was alive; and the world around me was absolutely real.

It occurred to me that my decision followed classic lines of thought: the nature of reality
a la
Bishop George Berkeley, and the Cartesian
cogito ergo sum.
Whatever it was based on, having made the decision made me feel much better. And it led me to examine the next fact.

FACT TWO:
This place did not exist on the Earth as I knew it. It had similarities to Death Valley in California, the great salt flats of Utah, and the desert areas around the Dead Sea. But I had been to all three places; I knew for a certainty that this desert was different. Nor could it be the Sahara or the Gobi, which I
hadn’t
seen; I knew they had nothing like the salty quality of this place.

Could I be on an entirely different planet? Only, I decided, if it weren’t in Earth’s planetary system. Even
I
knew that there were no planets except Earth in the Solar System with breathable atmosphere.

I didn’t have enough information to settle this question at the moment. I set it aside.

FACT THREE:
I had studied languages all my life, specializing in the Romance languages, but along the way acquiring a nodding friendship with most of the languages of my world. I had never even heard of this language. Where, when, and how did I acquire such an automatic command of Gandaresh?

There! It happened again! A word I need pops out of nowhere—a word I know, and yet I don’t.

Gandaresh: people-talk.

The word was there in my mind as though it had always been there. With it was another one:
Gandalara.
People-place. I had one of the answers I had been searching for. Where was I? Why, in Gandalara, of course.

But where, damn it
, is
Gandalara?

No answer.

So I had a memory I hadn’t had before, but it was limited to things of this world, the Gandalaran world. It would be no help in solving the puzzle of my presence here.
But
, I thought with relief,
it’s going to be a hell of a lot of help in getting along here!

FACT FOUR:
I had a very painful bump on the right side of my head, just above and behind the ear. What was
that
contributing to my state of mind?

It didn’t matter, I decided. I had done all the logical thinking I could or wanted to do. I’d relax a while and simply accept things as they came.

I got up from the padded stone and stretched experimentally. I could feel an annoying sting here and there on my hide—and winced at the memory of my trek across the desert. Looking back, it was almost as though I had
bounced
across it: up on my feet, flat on my face, up on my feet, slam to the ground …

All in all, it was remarkable that I felt so good. Abrasions all over my body, of course, and the palms of my hands felt very tender. I was a little stiff, but the stretching helped that. It could have been worse. Very much worse. By comparison to the condition I might have been in, I felt terrific.

I walked a few steps around the room, intending to look at everything, but I was first drawn to the wall of the house. Its translucent stone intrigued me; it was like no building material I had ever seen before. It had a random crystalline quality: it was generally more translucent than alabaster, but in some places it was as transparent as glass, in others as opaque as fine white marble. The closest familiar comparison I could make was to rock crystal—quartz.

The engineering problem seemed enormous. It took precision and skill and
lots
of power to mine and shape that hard mineral, and the impression these people had given me had no suggestion of that kind of power. How on Earth—
try to think like a native: how in Gandalara?
—could they mine and handle blocks about the size and shape of a case of beer?

Faen.
Beer.
Thank you, memory.
It was nice to know that fermentation was practiced here. Oh, a beer—how I wanted an ice cold beer!

I withdrew from that line of thought as fast I could. I had to concentrate on learning about
this
world, not waste time in longing for the one I had lost.

Still fascinated by the stone, I ran my dry palms over the wall. It was smoother than I had suspected. In fact, it seemed too smooth to be a natural mineral. Could it be some kind of cast glass? No; the crystalline structure was quite apparent. As I stared thoughtfully into the block which was at my eye level, I began to see something familiar in it. Distorted as they were, the crystals seemed cubic and they reminded me of
something …

It came to me. To confirm it, I wet one forefinger with my tongue, rubbed it on the wall, and tasted it.

Son of a bitch!
I thought.
The place is made of rock salt.

Now here was knowledge I could use. It meant, of course, that rock salt was readily available to the Fa’aldu, but besides that: One, it hadn’t rained here since this house was built; and Two, rain must have been unknown here for a long time
before
they built it. Surely nobody would go to the trouble to build a house like this if he expected it to be washed away at any moment. Building materials have to suit the environment. Adobe works fine, for instance, in the arid Southwest United States, but try building a ‘dobe
hacienda
on the coast of Maine.

I moved over to the draped doorway through which Keddan had gone. The heavy curtain seemed to have been woven of several different thicknesses of yarn. Some were merely thin threads, as smooth as tanned leather, but others were three times as thick, some of them fuzzy and bristly, like fat twine.

They were all different tones of the same medium blue, except for a wide strand so much lighter than the rest that it stood out from the blue background. It formed no pattern that I could see this close to it, so I stepped back a pace—

—and caught my breath.

The overall effect of the thing was a sheet of water—cascading from ceiling to floor.

An indoor waterfall in the middle of the desert! It was incredibly beautiful—even cooling.

I wondered, suddenly, if one of the people I had met had crafted that amazing tapestry.

As I looked around the room for more wonders, I caught sight of a polished bronze plaque set shoulder-high in the outer wall. I was seeing it from a shallow angle which should have made visible anything etched on its surface, and I could see nothing there. Curious, I walked over to stand directly in front of it.

For a moment, I thought I was looking through transparent metal—a window of some kind. Through it I saw, looking in, another member of that same family of heavy-browed, pug-nosed people. Embarrassed by the confrontation, I opened my mouth to speak—I don’t know what, a greeting, an apology—but I never said anything.

The man “outside” moved when I moved.

I was looking at my own reflection in a Gandalaran mirror—except that the face I saw in it was
not
my face. At least, it was not the face of Ricardo Carillo.

I stared into the eyes of a face I had never seen before, and they began to look terribly frightened. I looked away and examined the rest of the face instead. I was wearing it, after all; I should get to know it.

The supraorbital ridges were quite pronounced, making a semicircle of bone that hooded the eyes. The eyebrows were faint and sparse, composed of fine dark-blond hairs that followed the bony ridges across the top of the nose, around, and down to the corners of the eyes.

Above the supraorbital ridges, the brow was high, and short dark-blond hair swept down from the scalp in a sharp widow’s peak. I reached up with my left hand and touched it. It was short all over, like a crew cut, but it lay nearly flat against the skull. It was fine and soft, almost like fur.

I followed the line between the eyes down to the nose, and as I watched it, it wrinkled with distaste. Pug. Not as flat as that of the corpse in the desert, but most definitely a pug nose, and I have never been fond of them. They offend me for some reason—maybe because I don’t care to be looking up people’s nostrils.

I looked down to the mouth. Firm and large, perhaps a little too thin-lipped, but a very pleasant mouth—a mouth I could live with.

I smiled at the mirror image, just a little. Only the great canines showed. I smiled wider.

Look at those beautiful teeth!

Strong and white, even those tusks were gorgeous. I made faces into the mirror, trying to see all the way inside my mouth. Not a single cavity that I could see. I grabbed my upper teeth with the fingers of both hands and shook them until my head wobbled. They didn’t budge. They were rock-solid in this new mouth of mine.

No more dentures and their problems: Would my teeth click at the faculty meeting? Let’s see—no, I’d better not have a cob of corn. Trying surreptitiously to get a seed out from under my lower plate. No more of that now.

My own teeth again.
Hot damn!

I liked the chin, too. It was wide and strong and wellformed. So far, it was the most familiar part of the face; I fancied it was much like the Carillo chin.

The ears were a bit on the small side; they lay almost flat against the side of my head. Not bad ears at all.

The skin was dark, like a heavy tan on an Amerindian. Much darker than the skin of Ricardo Carillo. That was all right, too—I hadn’t had a decent tan in years.

Now
I could look into the eyes of my new face, and I was pleased to find that, aside from their frame, they were very much like the eyes I had always known. Darker brown, perhaps, and clearer around the iris.

I stepped back to take a look at the face as a whole. Not bad, actually, once one got used to it.

I accepted the incredible truth: what I saw in the mirror was
my
face.

I was
behind
it, looking out. I controlled it. It blinked or smiled when I told it to. It
belonged
to me—and yet it didn’t. I reminded myself that the English “face” and the French
façade
are cognates. Yes, I told myself, it
is
my face.

Now:
Who am I?

A few minutes before, I could have answered without hesitation: Ricardo Emilio Carillo. But that was before I saw myself. Coupled with the odd, unearned memory that popped up now and then, my new appearance changed everything.

As I groped for understanding, it occurred to me that sometimes amnesia acted this way. A concussion destroyed a man’s memories, and he had to start life over again. Years later a second blow on the head restored his memories of the early life and wiped away the years immediately past.

It wasn’t a true model for my situation, of course. But it helped me think things through. For me it was as though the “second blow” had called up only vague memories of that early time. I was still consciously Ricardo Carillo, but I was also someone else—someone whose memories were not quite available to me.

I wondered with a flash of panic if they would ever be entirely mine. I had to live in
his
world; without knowing who he was, without understanding this Gandalaran as well as I did Ricardo (which, after all, was little to ask—do we ever really know ourselves?), I would never make this world
my
world.

The amnesia model fell apart when I considered the physical change which had taken place. At that point in my thinking, I looked down at my new body. A man is more than his face.

I undid the drawstring and dropped the loose blue trousers I was wearing. Were these the same ones I had worn across the desert? I couldn’t tell. Then I removed a loosely-woven undergarment that was very much like boxer shorts with a drawstring.