The Search for Kä

by Randall Garrett

  The Search for Kä

  Copyright © 1984 by Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron

  All rights reserved.

  Published as an ebook in 2014 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  Cover design by Tara O'Shea

  Images © Dreamstime

  ISBN 978-1-625670-25-0

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Preliminary Proceedings

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  End Proceedings

  About the Authors

  Also by Randall Garrett & Vicki Ann Heydron

  PRELIMINARY PROCEEDINGS:

  INPUT SESSION FIVE

  —I didn’t mean to startle you, Recorder.

  —Forgive my surprise. I hear the festival proceeding. Is your participation not required?

  —It was, but for now my part is done, and I had no interest in seeing the rest of it.

  —Is that anger I hear in your voice?

  —Less anger, I think, than exasperation. The story is changed, again. Only a little more than last year, but by that small amount it is less true.

  —People will always prefer the story they hear from their friends to the one which must be retrieved from the All-Mind by a Recorder. And a story changes in the telling. It is the process by which history becomes legend.

  —I understand that, Recorder, and I might as well try to stop an angry sha’um as try to reverse the process. But actually witnessing it reminded me that I have been neglecting the task I set myself, that of placing the truth as I know it into the All-Mind. If it is convenient for you now, I would like to continue the Record.

  —Of course. Please, make yourself comfortable.

  —What about you, Recorder? Why aren’t you celebrating outside with the others?

  —I have shared your truth. Like you, I have no need to hear it retold as legend. I think, too, that only the time of your arrival was a surprise. I felt that you would require this service of me today.

  —“Require?” Never, Recorder. Request, yes. I have good reason to respect your skill and appreciate its value. If the time is not convenient …

  —I have said that it is. If you wish to Record, you must first calm yourself. Neither the All-Mind nor I, as its channel, will be able to accept your thoughts smoothly if they are not more ordered than your outward restlessness would indicate.

  —I apologize, Recorder. I suppose I am anticipating this session. The concentration required is so complete that it feels very much like reliving the experiences as we are Recording. And the very act of making a Record reminds me …

  —You are speaking, now, of the tale not yet Recorded?

  —Yes.

  —Then wait for the telling of it. For now, relax and listen while I prepare myself by recalling the scene which was last Recorded. You and Tarani had, once again, fled Eddarta. You were forced to leave behind the Ra’ira, but you have reason to suspect that it is safe from misuse because Tarani reported that her brother Indomel was having little success in learning its use. You plan to find the ancient city of Kä and retrieve a potent historical symbol, a sword which is the twin to Rika, both swords made of the rare metal, rakor. With the second sword as a talisman, you believe that Tarani can win the support of the other Lords, and take her place as Eddarta’s High Lord.

  —That was Tarani’s only goal, Recorder. I had a different reason for searching for the sword. I knew that Tarani, like me, was a blend of a human and a Gandalaran, except that in her case, both personalities were active. I believed that Tarani, who seemed consciously unaware of Antonia, would achieve integration through the same sort of medium which had turned me into the blended individual called Rikardon. Rika had been my catalyst; I believed that the other sword would work for Tarani.

  —But she knew nothing of this other goal.

  —No. To tell her would have meant exposing what I thought of as my betrayal, a lack of total honesty between us. We had achieved a physical and emotional closeness that I treasured above all things.

  —So we resume now with you and Tarani leaving the Valley of the Sha’um with Keeshah and his mate, who violates all history and instinct by leaving the Valley. Recall your feelings and thoughts at that time … good. Now make your mind one with mine, as I have made mine one with the All-Mind… .

  WE BEGIN!

  1

  “You were right,” Tarani conceded, when we had ridden well out of the Valley of the Sha’um. “It appears that Worfit has not chosen to wait for us.”

  “More accurately,” I said, “his men gave up—I doubt that Worfit has quit his hunt for me, or that he ever will.”

  Tarani stretched forward to stroke the fur along Yayshah’s lower jaw. The gray-and-brown brindled sha’um slowed, and pressed her cheek into Tarani’s hand.

  I watched the cat’s eye shut and the girl’s expression change as they slipped into mindlink communication. For Keeshah and me, who had formed our link when the huge tan cat had been a year-cub and the Gandalaran body I was wearing had been twelve years old, the flow of conscious thought between our minds was nearly second nature. Tarani and Yayshah, both fully adult, had formed their link only recently. For them, communicating took special, conscious effort—but I could see that it was becoming easier.

  Tarani’s face lost that distracted look, and she smiled at me with some embarrassment. “Forgive me,” she said. “It is only that Yayshah—when we speak—”

  The sha’um were walking, taking it easy by inclination and on my orders, so that Tarani and I were riding in a position more upright than usual, one much closer to a conventional sitting pose. I reached across the distance between the cats and took Tarani’s hand in mine.

  “When you talk to Yayshah, what is it like?” I asked.

  “It is very different from the way Lonna and I communicated,” she said.

  A shadow passed over her face at the mention of Lonna. The big white bird had helped us through some tight spots, and had seemed to be genuinely fond of me. But I only missed Lonna; Tarani had lost her. The bird had been her friend and companion for years, the inspiration of Tarani’s dream to have her own entertainment troupe, and one of its stars. Not even the magic of a sha’um’s friendship could replace what Tarani and Lonna had shared.

  “Lonna gave me images,” Tarani continued. “Yayshah speaks in impressions—do you understand what I mean?”

  “I think so,” I answered. “Not just a picture, but what she feels about it—fear or contentment, or whatever?”

  “Exactly,” Tarani agreed. “And she is trying to use—well, not words …“

  “Conversation,” I supplied, “is a deliberate attempt to convey or solicit ideas—the most sophisticated use of language. Language is only a code; you can think of a word as a unit of information. The direct contact with the sha’um makes the code unnecessary. Keeshah and Yayshah use units of meaning.“

  Tarani was staring at me, the dark eyes looking extraordinarily large in the pale and delicate contours of her face, made more angular by the loss of every unnecessary ounce of weight. I wondered, fleetingly, if the past few weeks of protracted physical effort showed so clearly in my body.

  “You continue to surprise me, Rikardon,” Tarani said. “The way you speak of contact with the sha’um—”

  “Is it diffe
rent for you and Yayshah?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “Your description is precise—but not, I feel sure, the product of a sudden insight. You have thought much about the nature of communication, have you not? To what purpose?”

  What have I done? I wondered, mentally trying to shake myself alert. She asked Rikardon a question and Ricardo, the language professor, answered her. I slipped right into my old “lecture mode”—a mannerism totally foreign to Markasset and, until now, to Rikardon.

  “Talking with a sha’um is fairly new to me, too,” I said, “even though Markasset had been doing it for years before I arrived. I’ve never been able to take it for granted—I’ve thought about it a lot, that’s all,” I finished lamely.

  “I do forget that you are a Visitor,” Tarani said, referring to a situation in which a surviving personality returned from the Gandalaran All-Mind to the body of a living person. Apparently this had been a rare but documented occurrence in Gandalaran history, and I had allowed my friends to believe I was such a case. “You have told me little of your earlier life—do you remember it clearly?”

  “Yes,” I answered, then groaned inwardly.

  Wrong answer, I thought. Now she’ll be curious, and I’ll have to dodge around the truth—that I come from a completely different world. I might be able to hide it without actually lying, but she’ll pick up on the fact that I was “covering up,” the way she detected the “professor” in me. And if I had to lie outright, then I’d have to remember which lies I’d told—I can’t let that get started.

  I must have been wearing my discomfort on my sleeve because Tarani said: “I will not ask of the past now. One day, perhaps?”

  I nodded. She smiled, and squeezed my hand lightly before she let it go and lay forward across Yayshah’s back, slipping into mental contact with the sha’um.

  I felt awful, as though I had broken my mother’s favorite vase, then hidden the pieces in the trash, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

  I wish I could just tell her who and what I really am, I thought. But I just don’t know how it would affect her. I’m reminded of a scene from Anna and the King, in which a fracas starts because an educated teacher shows the royal children a map with Siam represented in its true proportion to the rest of the world. Tarani doesn’t even know there is more to her world, much less that other worlds exist. The Gandalaran cloud cover has blocked the speculation of the nature of the universe that started in Ricardo’s world the first time a man saw a star.

  She found it difficult to understand why someone would want to study language—because hers is nearly homogeneous, as unquestioned a fixture of her life as the impassable mountains she calls “Walls.” How much harder will it be for her to accept the idea that Gandalara—which seems to me to be two humongous valleys which, placed end to end, are no more than sixteen hundred miles long—has to be only a fraction of the land area on this planet?

  But “culture shock” isn’t the only reason I’m reluctant, I admitted to myself.

  Tarani lay with her cheek pressed against Yayshah’s back, just behind the cat’s shoulder. Her eyes were closed, and the look of distraction was fading, the muscles of her face relaxing as she dozed off. Awake, Tarani was a formidable woman, strong and competent. Asleep, she looked even younger than her twenty years, thin rather than slim, touchingly vulnerable.

  Our relationship exists on many levels, I thought. We have fought the same enemies and lain together, sharing battle and passion and what we have come to believe is our destiny. The one thing we haven’t shared equally is the truth about our pasts.

  Tarani told me about her “arrangement” with Molik under duress, before she really knew me, but the fact remains that I do know how she earned the money to put together that show. She thought that her dancing was all she ever wanted, and worth using her illusion power to help satisfy the roguelord’s lust. But that earlier relationship was still affecting her when I met her. It wasn’t until we faced Molik, and she admitted the shame was more in her perception than in her actions that she was able to forgive him and herself, and be free.

  Free of the shame, I corrected myself, but not of the memory.

  She was occupied at that time with worry over Volitar, the man she had known as her uncle, and whom Molik had kidnapped—to coerce Tarani into helping a pair of assassins he was sending after the Lieutenant of the Sharith. When Molik (thanks to Thymas), Volitar (thanks to Gharlas) and Tarani’s show (her own choice) were all dead, the girl’s past was still with her.

  I think that some of Tarani’s feeling of “destiny” can be attributed to her need to have some new direction in her life. She came with me, partly, in order to leave behind her past.

  That’s why I can’t bring myself to tell her the truth about Ricardo and Markasset, I realized. It’s not only that she has trusted me, and that I’ve been lying by evasion whenever we’ve discussed my “dual” nature. If I tell her about Ricardo, I can’t see any way not to tell her about Antonia, too—and that troubled period that centered around Molik will come sharply into focus again, with a slightly different perspective.

  Antonia Alderuccio had been with Ricardo Carillo on the deck of that cruise ship when the meteor—or whatever it was—had hit us. She had been a recent acquaintance, and I had been so occupied in Gandalara that I had given her little thought, except to regret that someone so lovely and charming had been lost. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might have come to Gandalara, too—until I had heard Tarani, in a moment of distracted passion, pronounce my name “Ricardo.” A man’s name without a consonant ending is totally alien to Tarani’s culture. I had realized, then, that Antonia had come into this world four years earlier, objective time, and in a different way.

  I had occupied a body whose Gandalaran personality had recently died; Antonia had been forced to share her “host” with a live, native personality.

  I’m absolutely convinced that it was Antonia who taught a sweet and sheltered sixteen-year-old girl the power of her body, and showed her how to use it. I’m also sure that Antonia has only meant to help the Gandalaran girl. Except for intensifying the conflict between control and helplessness that all adolescents suffer, Antonia’s worldliness and maturity have generally been assets to Tarani. The human presence gave Tarani the same protection from Gandalara’s mindpower that I have—a dualness that isn’t subject to a uniquely Gandalaran force. But Antonia’s undetected influence has brought a great deal of confusion and distress into Tarani’s life.

  Tarani and I have talked about the fact that two people such as we are needed, right here and right now, to keep anyone—least of all her cruel brother Indomel—from using the Ra’ira’s power as a telepathic channel to tyrannize and, ultimately, destroy Gandalara. Ricardo and Antonia, it seems, are equally part of that destiny. I can’t help being afraid that, once Tarani knows the truth, I’ll be linked with that past she’s trying to avoid, and—I shuddered—and she’ll run from me, just as she runs from her past now.

  I’d lose her, I thought. Them. Tarani and Antonia. I love them both, with passion, respect, protectiveness, tenderness, humility—with a magnitude neither Ricardo nor Markasset ever experienced.

  When we find the sword—please, God, let that sword be the agent of their union.

  I realized that I was actually and sincerely praying—the first time in a long while. And I was a trifle embarrassed to realize that what I was really praying for was what Ricardo would have called a “cop-out.”

  I want the union between Tarani and Antonia to do my explaining for me, I realized. I want Tarani to understand and forgive, all in one blinding flash of comprehension.

  I sighed.

  It would be nice to be able to talk to Tarani without having to hide anything. Right now, no one knows the truth—

  *I know.*

  I jumped when Keeshah’s thought touched my mind. The feel of his fur under my hands and his body between my legs brought me vividly back to reality.

  *How is it, Keeshah,*
I asked, when I had recovered from my shock, *that you can follow my thoughts without my knowing it, but I have to ask what you’re thinking?*

  I was referring to our conscious conversation, not the rare moments in which he and I merged so completely that we could share one another’s sensory perception.

  *You think more,* he said.

  I laughed aloud, remembering at the last second to muffle the noise so that I wouldn’t wake Tarani. Yayshah looked around at me, her eyes slitted and her ears cocked back warily, then returned her attention to the route we were taking.

  We had left behind the thick, tangled greenery that characterized the Valley of the Sha’um—although, strictly speaking, the area was less a valley than the verdant foothills at the junction of two mountain ranges. The Morkadahls ran roughly north and south, and another range of high mountains, which formed part of what the Gandalarans called the Great Wall, ran roughly east and west. I guessed there must have been a network of small streams trickling down from the higher ground, and probably a sort of underground delta effect, to support the lushness of the Valley.

  We were traveling south, following the eastern edge of the Morkadahls. The countryside here was much like what I had seen on the western side of the range—twisted and curling dakathrenil trees mixed with lots of species of bushes. Unlike the towering forest that marked the home of the sha’um, few of these plants grew more than six feet high, preferring to cling to and shade the water-giving ground and, in the process, provide homes for the variety of small animals, insects and birds that shared their space.

  Moving across the overgrown ground should have been little problem for the sha’um, who were accustomed to the much taller, more complicated, and occasionally barbed undergrowth of the Valley. But I could see that Yayshah was moving with exaggerated caution, placing her feet carefully.

  *She’s having a harder time than you are, Keeshah,* I said. *Is it because of her cubs? Is it hurting her to travel?*

  *Don’t know,* the cat replied.

  There was an overtone of worry in Keeshah’s mind, and something more. I felt a sudden sense of alarm.