The River Wall

by Randall Garrett

  “Not you too?” I groaned, and grabbed to protect the most vulnerable part of my anatomy. But Yayshah placed her paw delicately on the ground on the other side of me, and carefully stepped over my prostrate—and thoroughly dirty—body.

  I sat up with every intention of yelling at the cubs, then I grabbed frantically for the bedcover. Tarani and Zanek were in the doorway, laughing like idiots.

  What the hell? I thought grumpily.

  I stood up, gathered the bedcover, and threw it to the ground. Then I took off for the stream at a run and, before the sha’um could catch my purpose and react, I vaulted over the cubs and landed painfully—but with a great deal of splashing and satisfaction—in the middle of the stream.

  The cubs howled and backed away, shaking themselves. Yayshah looked mortally offended, so that I felt obliged to say: “Sorry—I know you didn’t deserve that.” Keeshah merely turned upstream to drink from the unmuddied water, but he had to have the last word.

  *Still look silly,* he said.

  I turned around to climb out of the stream, but found Tarani there, holding out a bar of scented soap. “As long as you’ve begun …?” she said, and my grumpiness dissolved. I took the soap, laughing, and she laid a towel and a set of clothes across a twisting dakathrenil limb. “Breakfast will be ready, when you are dry.”

  Over breakfast—fruit and bread and a soft cheese—Tarani and I discussed how much we still did not know. We had overcome our disappointment over Zanek not having all the answers, but I, for one, felt the niggling frustration of having the answers within reach.

  “All the pieces are here somewhere,” I said, for probably the fourteenth time. “Why can’t we see how they fit together?”

  “I must repeat that I am not the one who is capable of assembling them,” said Zanek, who had been silent and thoughtful through most of the meal. “There must be something that you two—no one else—know or can do.”

  “We have told you of Ferrathyn, and our resistance to his power,” Tarani said. “Is that not unique in Gandalara?”

  “It’s unique,” I said, “but—I know this sounds stupid, after all we’ve been doing—but its not important enough. Ferrathyn is dangerous, he will corrupt and destroy the societies of Gandalara. But how and why would he deliberately destroy the people themselves? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Perhaps Ferrathyn is only part of it,” Zanek said. “He may be, in fact, the part of the puzzle which I detected—it might have been the misuse of the Ra’ira that caught my attention in the first place. There are other things you have done which have affected Gandalara profoundly. Perhaps it is only as a whole that it makes sense. Eddarta becoming more humane. The sha’um protected from destruction. The Sharith, for the first time in generations, with a Captain to lead them. The—What is it, my friend?”

  I had caught Zanek’s hand without realizing it. The fruit he held fell unnoticed to the floor. I was looking at him, but what I was seeing was something else. Hazy images were crystallizing, pieces were falling into place. A map. A volcano. Salty deserts. Copper. No iron.

  The result was an answer that I believed and rejected in exactly the same thought.

  “No!” I moaned. “That can’t be it!”

  But I knew it was true, and it raised a specter that terrified me so that I began to shake all over.

  “Please, no,” I said again, whispering now. I turned my eyes toward Tarani, who was watching me in alarm. “Not now, not ever, that’s too much to ask.”

  “Rikardon, tell us,” Tarani pleaded, sliding down from her chair to kneel beside me. I still clutched Zanek’s hand fiercely.

  “Get the map,” I begged Tarani. “Hurry, get it, please.” She rushed to hunt for it, and I looked down to find Zanek’s fingers turning white in my grasp. I released his hand, mumbling “Sorry.”

  “You know, don’t you?” he asked softly. “Is it so horrible? Can it be changed?”

  “Changed?” I echoed. Tarani arrived, knocked the dishes aside, and, kneeling beside me, unfolded the map on the small table. “You were the one,” I said to Tarani, “who first mentioned that the map looked familiar. Study it now, and try to figure out why it’s so familiar.”

  She started to protest.

  “Don’t you understand?” I asked, nearly yelling. “I could be wrong, so wrong! I need you to figure it out on your own. Look at the map through Antonia’s memories. Please, Tarani, do it.”

  With a puzzled frown, she did as I asked. Her fingers traced the lines of the Walls slowly, and her face was intent as she stared at the parchment. After a moment, she said, in a strained voice: “There is still a familiarity, but I cannot capture it. I cannot, my love. Please—just tell me.”

  “Try this,” I said, and took the map. “Gandalaran map convention shows the Great Wall as the northern border of the world, right? But we both know that this line”—I pointed to the thick line that ran unevenly across the top of the map—“actually runs sort of northwest-southeast.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, as I rotated the map to put the line into that position from her viewpoint. She frowned. “Yes, from that perspective, the feeling of familiarity is stronger.”

  “Then consider what the land is like,” I went on. Zanek was leaning over the table, silent and tense. “There are few heavy metals, few metals at all, in fact, except east and north of Eddarta.”

  “In the copper mines,” she said, “here.” She put her finger on the map in the general area I had described, then she touched the area marked “Rikalara”—“the high place.” “There is something about this positioning,” she said, and moved her hand to Raithskar. “And the shape of this border … Ahh-h-h!”

  She flew back from the map as if she had been stung.

  She cowered away for a moment, then came back toward the table and put a trembling hand on the map. “It makes an insane sort of sense,” she said. “But—I still do not see how …”

  “What? What is it?” demanded Zanek, looking from one to the other of us.

  I held my hand up to calm him. “Give me just one more minute,” I begged. “Tarani, tell me. Say it. Please.“

  She touched the area of the copper mines.

  “This is Cyprus,” she said, the non-Gandalaran word sounding odd but musical. She tapped the map southwest of the copper mines. “Eddarta—it must lie at the mouth of the Nile.” Her finger moved west. “Rikalara—Crete.” She skipped over to Raithskar and followed the line of the Great Wall with a gesture that was unconsciously caressing. “The Skarkel River—the Rhone?”

  She looked up at me, her eyes hollow and still questioning. “The land masses seem very different, but the outline is recognizable. The Middle Sea, the Mediterranean. That is it, is it not, Rikardon? The sea has vanished, and Gandalarans walk its dry and salty floor?”

  I saw panic start to form in the back of her dark eyes, and I took her hands. “What happened?” she wailed. “The sea, our world—what has happened to us?”

  “Nothing,” I shouted, slipping down to kneel beside her and hold her tightly against me. “Believe me, please. Our world is safe.” She shivered so violently that we were both shaking. “You and I—that is, Antonia and Ricardo—we are the only ones affected by this.”

  “How do you know?” she demanded. “Where has the water gone? Surely this could not happen quickly—Madre mia” she whispered in Italian. “We have moved through time. A war? A holocaust? Devastation and a new evolution? Time, so much time—how much time? Ricardo, how much time?”

  “Fifty million years,” I said, “or thereabouts. But not forward, Tarani. Back. We are in our own earths past.”

  She grew still, then drew away from me. “What?”

  “Geology held a lot of interest for Ricardo. I read about the discoveries in the Mediterranean that proved it had been closed off and dried up at one time. The tectonic plates of Europe and Africa had shifted toward each other, and closed up the Straits of Gibraltar. Scientists found evidence of the evaporation on t
he ocean floor. Salt mounds. Like the up-and-down character of the Kapiral—rounded hills underneath a centuries-long buildup of drifting sand.” I was speaking quickly, throwing in English words where Gandaresh was inadequate.

  “The past?” Tarani whispered, and I nodded.

  “My friends,” Zanek said, his voice strained. “Your words are strange, but I gather that you have found the answer to the mystery. Please, I beg you, speak to me in words that I can understand. What is happening? Can you stop it?”

  Tarani and I stared at one another. We were not ignoring Zanek purposely, but we were entirely caught up in a shared, awesome vision.

  “It became a sea again,” Tarani said.

  “Yes, the plates shifted again; the straits reopened; the floor of the ocean filled with water. It took a long time,” I said, thoughtfully. “Anything built of salt would have dissolved gradually. Stone and wood buildings would have rotted and shifted until they became part of the ocean floor, nothing more than starting places for coral colonies.”

  “We sailed upon that sea in our own time,” Tarani said shakily. “Do you see what that means? We did not prevent it in our past. If we could prevent it—would that not destroy the present we knew, possibly prevent our existence? But …” She frowned. “If we did not exist, we would not have been called to Gandalara. We would not have had the opportunity to interfere.”

  “Hush,” I said. “You’re describing the classic paradox of time travel. We are here now,” I said. “And I don’t think we’re intended to stop the Mediterranean from refilling. It’s not possible—not even with the technology and explosives of our own time. The earth’s might is too great to control.”

  “Then what?” Tarani asked. “What can we do? What did we do?”

  “Stop thinking like that,” I urged her. “What we do and what we did may not be the same thing.”

  The thought felt right, and I began to be excited.

  “They may not be the same thing at all.”

  21

  A knocking sounded from the doorway, making us all jump so violently that the table overturned and the map flew into Zanek’s lap. A serving dish flipped up by the edge of the table, rocketed through the air, and shattered loudly against the stone of the wall.

  Thymas rushed in, alarmed by the noise.

  “Rikardon, Tarani, I did not mean to frighten you—” The boy stopped in his tracks when he noticed the white-haired man. “Father?” he asked. Thymas rushed over to crouch awkwardly beside the chair and throw his arms around the man he had known, all his life, as Dharak.

  Tarani and I exchanged glances, then rose quietly and went outside. I looked back to see Zanek holding the boy tenderly. Over the shaking shoulders, he nodded to us, grimly agreeing that the boy deserved the consideration of privacy when he learned the truth.

  Thymas’s arrival—and our feelings about that—provided only a momentary distraction from the problem.

  “In the world Rikardon and Antonia knew,” Tarani said, “Gandalara died without a trace—vanished. How can we alter what was? And if we could …”

  She frowned, and I saw that she was caught up again in the paradox. I took her shoulders and turned her to face me.

  “We can’t,” I said. “We can’t alter our own world. Accept that, and don’t be afraid that what we do here will affect anything in the present which we knew—not the one we lived in.”

  “‘The one‘?” she quoted.

  “There are as many theories about time as there are people who think about it seriously,” I said. “One of them says that there are things called timelines, moving along parallel to one another. The theory goes that such timelines are created at a moment of choice somewhere in their common past. Some of them also say that, at that critical choice point—and most theorists agree that it does have to be an event of some significance—all possible alternatives are chosen, each one developing an independent timeline.”

  She frowned again, thinking hard. “Do you mean that since we are here, our mere presence has generated a new timeline, and Gandalara will survive?” She pushed me away, and paced off toward the stream. “How? We could not hold back the water? What could we—” She whirled back. “We cannot save this world,” she said, “but we may be able to save the people. That is it, am I right? It is the special knowledge Zanek wished for. We know, we can tell them, we can save them!”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Wait a minute. You seem to be asking me for an opinion, but you’re not giving me a chance to answer. Some of that, I think, is right. Some of it isn’t.”

  “Which?” she demanded. “The use of our knowledge—that is correct, it must be; there is no other way in which we might help.”

  “I think you’re absolutely right about that. It is the ‘bottom line.’ It’s why we’re here,” I said. “But it’s not as simple as it sounds, and there is more to it. How can that knowledge help Gandalara in and of itself, Tarani? We start now, and tell everyone that the earthquake and the volcano are symptoms of the end of their world? The Great Pleth is coming back, a lot faster than it left, and if they don’t hurry, they’re going to drown in it? Think like only Tarani for a moment, darling. How would she react to such an announcement?”

  The girl stared at the wall of the house, thinking, and then her shoulders sagged.

  “I see,” she said. “No one will believe. They do not have the concepts to believe.” There was sadness, fear, and confusion in her eyes as she turned to me. “Have we come to Gandalara only to die in its death throes?” she asked. “And what of your all-possible-choices theory? We are here—will we not, merely by that truth, contribute some change?”

  “We have the opportunity to contribute change,” I said. “That is what Zanek wished for, and what he got. I think I said that the all-possible-choices theory is only one line of thought in the area. Others say that people are the key, that which timelines develop depends on the actions or merely the existence of people in a position to make those choices. There must be a timeline, for instance, in which Adolf Hitler died during one of his childhood illnesses, and the Third Reich never happened.

  “We can be that key here, Tarani,” I said, “but not just by telling the truth.” I took a deep breath. For the first time since I had arrived in Gandalara it all did, truly, finally make sense to me. There was a residual, continuous “Why me?” sort of feeling, but all the whats and whys were at last coming to light.

  “It will take years to refill the basin,” I said. “What did Zanek say? Three to five generations? But remember, he saw the All-Mind as it was before you and I came.

  “Try to look at today’s Gandalara as it would have been without us, Tarani. Ferrathyn unchallenged, probably already in control of Raithskar. The sha’um dead or dying. The Chizan crossing impassable because Chizan itself had been destroyed and abandoned. Eddarta with the Lords still thinking only of their own welfare, living enclosed and isolated. They would notice the lack of trade from the western side, of course, but their response would be to drain their landservants of the luxuries they were missing, until revolution took hold and the whole society of Eddarta was reduced to a disorganized mob. Under those conditions, I can readily see the end of life in Gandalara within five generations.

  “But the government of Eddarta has been awakened, and the life-supporting corridor between Raithskar and Eddarta is still open, thanks to Ligor. Already, we have bought more time for the people of Gandalara.

  “We can’t change the physical truth, Tarani, but we have already changed the social character of Gandalara, and we need to make more changes. The only chance these people have is to recognize their danger now and begin to do something now. While Ferrathyn’s around and contributing disorder and chaos, everyone will be too preoccupied to notice what’s happening until it’s too late—even if they could understand it.”

  “Are you saying,” Tarani asked slowly, “that our destiny remains, partly at least, what we thought it to be—Ferrathyn’s defeat? What of the Ra’ira?”
She looked at me sharply, struck by a sudden thought. “Rikardon, could the Ra’ira be a weapon against this disaster? Might the flooding be stopped, or contained, through some property of the stone?”

  “I doubt it,” I said, frowning. “I think our role with respect to the Ra’ira is defensive, as it has always been. Get it away from Ferrathyn and protect it from madmen like him in the future.”

  She made a gesture of exasperation. “Then I still do not see, my love, anything we might do to prevent the calamity. Delay, yes, I accept that we have accomplished at least that much. But not prevention. Have we come here for a futile purpose?”

  I took her shoulders and turned her toward me. “You’re thinking totally like Tarani,” I said, “like a native of Gandalara who believes that the World between the Walls is all the world there is.”

  She gasped. “You would have us leave Gandalara? But that is not—” She stopped to think a moment. “I see that it is physically possible,” she admitted, “in one way. That is, there are some areas of the Walls which might be climbable. Yet recall how difficult it is to breathe in the high places. We would have no strength—to climb the Walls would be as sure a death as to walk into the growing Pleth and drown.”

  “That’s true now,” I agreed, “because we’re adapted to the air pressure and altitude of the floor of Gandalara. We—our Gandalaran bodies—were born here. But we—our other bodies—were born with the top of the Walls as the floor of our world, and we survived there pretty easily. As nearly as I can figure it, the Khumbar Pass is almost at a height which Ricardo and Antonia thought of as ‘sea level.’ In their world, it would be the narrow channel between Corsica and Sardinia. I’ve crossed that pass, Tarani—Keeshah and I both made it. That tells me that Gandalarans have the basic lung power to survive on the—let’s call it the ‘surface.’ A person born on the floor of Gandalara would not be comfortable on the surface, because it is too much a change from the metabolism, lung and heart speed that his body has trained itself to. But a person born and raised on the Walls of Gandalara—say half a mile below the surface—could make that climb and live reasonably comfortably on the surface.”