Vulcan's Soul Trilogy Book One Read online

  Such a weight of trickery in those words! And to think, he had tried to be sparing in his use of water, to deny himself!

  Karatek let his eyes blaze, then lowered his head. Anger—any emotion here on the Forge—was simply not worth the energy it consumed.

  Surak could not know. He had no children. He could not know how a father might abandon pretense of pride in the daily struggle to endure, to create even a hint of shade for his children, to give them the last drops of water in his flask.

  Even if Surak said it was illogical. As Karatek met his eyes, he saw the man’s face go gentle for an instant.

  Was it true that Surak did not understand a father’s love? Karatek asked himself. Again, he saw Varen, bleeding, dying in Surak’s arms. Surak’s face had changed: his fight to control himself had been a visible, frightening thing. Perhaps that was why he insisted now on making the pilgrimage to Seleya bearing Varen’s katra when the purity of the desert might have been, even logically speaking, funeral enough.

  And perhaps he had other reasons altogether.

  Sarissa’s face, beneath the hood of her suit, was unreadable. She had allowed Varen to aid her over rocky ground once or twice, had thanked him in a low, sweet voice—and would that have been so bad? Karatek thought. Varen had been a fine, clean young man with a spirit of fire. His whole life had stretched out before him, and now what was he? A disembodied katra floating about in Surak’s mind. His logic would be as cool as fresh water: a relief for poor Varen.

  Under Surak’s dispassionate gaze, Karatek felt his rage finally dissipate to a level he could bear. He unhooked his water flask and drank.

  The last stars paled in the sky when the wind finally changed. Kovar’s head went up, and he sniffed the air.

  “Water.” The boy’s bleeding lips shaped the blessed word without sound.

  The subtle fragrance of water lured them forward, thin figures in sandsuits that hung in shabby folds on them; sharp eyes whose sockets they had stained against the glare. On other days, they had always sought refuge before dawn against the fury of sunlight on the Forge. Now the scent of water drew them onward. They allowed themselves to step up the pace, but kept wary: where there was water, there were predators—and prey.

  As the sky brightened around them, the air cooled, then darkened as they entered the shadow of Seleya’s majestic bulk. Karatek squandered a moment to gaze longingly up at the astonishing snow that shrouded the peak behind the sanctuary. The idea of walking in that whiteness seemed like the hallucination of a man dying of thirst in the deep desert.

  A rippling glare at their feet dazzled them. They stopped short before they stumbled into the ablutions pools at Seleya’s foot. Skamandros turned his head, unobtrusively pointing out the guard post, hollowed out of a giant boulder. Karatek couldn’t remember a guard post from the only other time he had been to Seleya. Kovar tumbled to his knees. Sarissa’s eyes flashed from Karatek to Surak, observing. Then she knelt in time with Surak and Karatek, bending toward the water as gracefully as a flower.

  Slipping off his boots, Karatek scooped water over his feet. Not even the blessedness of that relief altered Surak’s expression. Kylin’the plants grew by the pool, their spiked leaves forming a crown of deep green and amber. Remembering his old training, Karatek whispered thanks and a blessing before he snapped off a leaf. As his children watched, he used the sap beading the broken edge to coat the worst of his blisters: kylin’the balm brought relief from pain and quick healing. He nodded at them to break off leaves and tend their own hurts.

  The last rags of his self-respect restrained Karatek from measuring his length in the pool and letting the water refresh his entire body. He contented himself with a drink that was long, but not as much as he wanted, before he sprinkled water on his face and hands. Suppressing a sigh, he rubbed his feet before beginning the ritual purifications.

  “Put your boots back on,” Sarissa ordered her younger brother. “Thee remains in my charge until thee passes kahs-wan.”

  Karatek suppressed a skeptical chuckle: the crossing they had just survived had made his own trial feel like a stroll in a garden. Now, they faced another ordeal: the pilgrimage up the thousand steps of Mount Seleya was customarily made barefoot.

  “What about you?” Kovar whispered furiously, wriggling away from her as she sought to refasten his boots.

  “Sarissa will yield to the logic of the situation,” Surak cut in smoothly. “You must all protect your feet. If you cannot mount the stairs before nightfall, we shall have to camp down here.”

  She glanced imploringly at Karatek. “Father?” she asked.

  Why, that clever little le-matya kit! Karatek had wondered when she would call him father, had longed for it. What if she never did? What if he could not bear it? Now, she had done so, and he wanted to laugh out loud at his new daughter’s guile.

  “Listen to wisdom, not pride, my child,” Karatek told her. He refastened his boots. “T’Kehr Surak asks wise questions. So I will listen to him myself.”

  After Seleya, they would have to face the return march to ShiKahr. Surak and Skamandros might be hardened to it through long practice, but the others could not make it on feet that were abraded and bleeding.

  Skamandros raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. Removing his boots, he followed Surak up the spiraling stairs of Mount Seleya. The stone was hot, but neither he nor Surak as much as flinched. And neither man’s feet left dark green smears upon the stones, worn smooth and hollow by generations of pilgrims to this shrine, ancient even for Vulcan.

  Karatek gestured Sarissa and Kovar to follow the other men and brought up the rear of their party, guarding his children’s backs. It would, after all, have been illogical to dispute his right. And Surak was never that, now, was he?

  Father. Sarissa’s word did not replace or heal his daughter’s death. But the scars that had seemed to replace his heart seemed to ease and his breath came the easier.

  Already high above the beasts, the indwellers, and the raiders to be found in the desert, Karatek mounted stair after stair and indulged himself in the discomfort of his thoughts.

  Surak wanted the best minds and hearts on Vulcan to exile themselves, to seek out the stars before ships were ready, before they could reach them within a Vulcan’s normal life span.

  But he knew his people. They would be afraid to go. He was afraid. Wasn’t it only logical to fear the unknown?

  Gradually Surak’s logic replaced blind fear and rationalization: like his former—no, his colleagues at the Vulcan Space Initiative, Surak wanted what was best for their world. And if the needs of the many outweighed, as Surak said, the needs of the few and required them to leave their home, perhaps they would have to consider it.

  But what of the needs of the few? Karatek protested to himself. After all, they loved their world, too. But the evidence was mounting up that, for the Mother World’s sake, some of them dared not stay. War was coming. It might be that those who left would postpone the Mother World’s ability to invent weapons that could destroy it once and for all.

  And if not, then surely, as Surak said, it was logical for there to be a saving remnant who could look back at the shards that had once been their homeworld and remember it.

  And prevent that from ever happening again! Perhaps, next time, Surak’s logic would prevent the grief from destroying them as they had destroyed their home.

  Hail Surak, bringer of a second chance! Karatek’s irony cut as sharply as the stone.

  Up the steps of Mount Seleya Karatek climbed. A thousand steps, the rituals said. It felt like far, far more.

  The steps narrowed, slanted. The pilgrims passed beneath tilted, cracked arches cut into the ruddy stone that granted them blessed flickers of shade.

  And then the ground leveled. They stood on a plateau beneath the snow-topped peak. An immense building, like a truncated cone, stood to one side: the adepts and their disciples lived and worked there. Rumor had it that they had tunneled deep into the rock. If Vulcan burned,
they alone might well survive—but for what?

  Not thirty yards away, the plateau dropped off into a chasm crossed only by a narrow rock span. No handholds, and even an infinitesimal arch at its center. But beyond that bridge lay the Halls of Ancient Thought.

  “Drink your water,” Karatek urged Kovar and Sarissa.

  Surak, Skamandros padding at his heels, had already crossed.

  “Quickly, before the night wind rises!” Skamandros called. An adept might cross the bridge in the wind, but anyone else would surely be knocked into the abyss. As it was, they would have to sleep in the shrine—or make their visit a brief one.

  The air was thin. Karatek’s back, eyes, and head ached. Lava lay below: he could not see it for the steam that created clouds far, far below the bridge.

  “Go,” he said. And because they were his children and, already, he loved them, “it is no disgrace to crawl across the span,” he said.

  Their heads came up. Clearly, he had offered his children not comfort but a challenge. Walking slowly, not looking down, but across the chasm to the sanctuary, they made it to the other side. True, Kovar sank onto the ground for a moment, breathing hard, but Sarissa stood at Surak’s side.

  “Come, Father,” she said in a sweet, steady voice. She held out her hand. Worn as he was, Karatek felt as if he could leap across the bridge.

  He crossed, his back as straight, his step as steady as if he were Surak himself. And when he had reached the other side, he stayed on his feet and even managed to keep from grinning in triumph. Skamandros nodded in grudging approval.

  Surak led the way past the amphitheatre into the sanctuary. It was the oldest working shrine on Vulcan: two squared towers carved of rough stone that, thousands of years ago, priests and worshippers had quarried, then cut and carried up the slope on patient, muscular backs.

  The terrible impact of Vulcan’s sun dissipated as they entered the shrine, but not its light. Its rays slashed through lancets carved out of the thick golden stone, glinting with veins of precious copper, flecked with crystals, that rose many times the height of a tall Vulcan. Though the sun was sinking, the light still seemed almost solid: where it met the massive pillars and walls, it seemed to war with them, creating deep shadows. Immense pillars of greenish bronze metal, their bases wrought in the form of water plants, held light that cast a smell as sweet as the incense that rose from braziers wrought in the form of savage beasts, smoke rising from between their fangs, light glinting in their eyes. Sunlight and flame made the alcoves between columns seem even darker and more mysterious, whispering with the wind and the dancing grains of sand that it blew into the Hall.

  In the coolness of those alcoves reposed the urns of memory. Each rested in its own niche, niche upon niche from the worn paving stones to the coffered ceiling, inlaid with priceless wood. Each urn held a katra. Some glowed faintly as powerful minds sought to comprehend the world they had known and walked as living beings. Others were dark.

  One urn was empty. Its stopper, wrought in the form of a kylin’the, crystal dew beading its crest, lay to one side on the hollowed paving, as if the adepts of the mountain had already divined the reason for their coming.

  At the end of the hall was a raised platform, illuminated by torches at each corner and blazing with light from a triangular window carved high overhead. Standing on the platform was an immense gong, wrought of the same bloodmetal as the torch holders.

  Without hesitation, Surak walked over to the dais and struck the gong. It throbbed until the rock itself seemed to quiver. Kovar swayed as if dizzy, and Karatek put out a hand to steady him, grateful for the reassurance of flesh against flesh.

  The light seemed to dazzle him. When it subsided, Karatek saw that adepts had joined them: a priestess in the red and white of Seleya, wearing a gemstone at her brow, set in the form of a shavokh. At her side was a priest who wore the dusty white robe with the padded hem and cabochon gems that indicated his rank in the hierarchy of Gol.

  Although Skamandros knelt, Surak paid no homage beyond the polite bow he would have accorded any elder. Behind the priestess, an acolyte hissed, then fell silent.

  From behind them, across the bridge, throbbed another gong and the beat of immense hollow drums. A double line of priestesses entered the shrine, chanting as they walked. They were graceful, swaying in their white shifts. Their glossy black hair poured down their backs like water in the wilderness, barely ruffled although Karatek could hear the winds begin to rise outside. These were the Unbonded whose unselfish care saved many Vulcans from dying when their blood burned and they had no mate.

  “Get behind me,” Karatek whispered to Sarissa. As an unbonded girl of no family, she might be of special, specific value to the adepts here. But Karatek had not rescued the girl only to give her to Seleya. Sarissa had already sacrificed enough in her short life.

  He raised his chin, challenging the priestess to object. She said nothing. Instead, she pointed to the empty urn.

  Surak walked to the urn and stroked it with long, sensitive fingers. Despite his physical and mental control, he shivered as he released Varen’s katra from his consciousness.

  A faint glow kindled in the center of the urn. Surak’s face lightened, and he laid his fingers on its side as he might have touched the living Varen’s shoulder in approval.

  “Sorrow?” Karatek could not resist asking.

  “I take satisfaction in the fact that this katra has found a home. So many others have died like water spilled upon the barren rock, or blood poured into the sand. Varen will have time to think, to remember, and to realize—” The flicker of Surak’s eyelids would have been a wail of pain from anyone else.

  His face gentled. “Become wise before thee journeys onward,” he told the light within the vessel. A long, long pause. Karatek thought Surak had finished speaking and almost broke in. “My son,” Surak finished.

  Karatek remembered. Surak wasn’t just a noted computer scientist or a rebel philosopher: he was a poet. When the first volume of his Analects had been published, it had sparked three riots and won two literary awards.

  The Gol priest bowed to Surak. Karatek recalled that the Analects had inspired the adepts at Gol to devote themselves to logic with a fervor that would have been fanatic—if fanaticism were not itself illogical.

  “Have you come finally to stay with us or to dispute further?” asked the priest from Gol.

  “The winds are rising. We request hospitality for the night,” Surak replied. “Will the high priestess debate me?”

  “She will not!” Gol’s adept cut in, to be rewarded by a fierce look from the priestess.

  “Hear me, heed me,” Surak began what Karatek knew was the long skein of persuasions that had worked on so many scientists.

  Priestess and adept listened for a time, the Unbonded clustered at their backs.

  “Kroykah!” cried the priestess. “Thee may not stay. Thee disturbs every place thee touches.”

  “I will not ask forgiveness for being myself, walking where I walk, or thinking what I think. You yourself taught me: The mind is sacrosanct. But I will beg pardon for disturbing thy meditations,” Surak said. “I admit I came again to debate with thee. But more than that, I came to grant release to a youth who had become like a son.”

  The priestess’s face softened.

  “Vulcan thanks thee for the gift of a precious katra, a soul,” she said. “What thanks would thee ask in return?”

  “One does not thank logic,” Surak said. “Varen entrusted his katra to me. Logic required that I bring it to its long home.”

  Predictable enough, thought Karatek. He made himself suppress a smile.

  “We cannot grant thee the thanks thee wishes of listening, then assenting to thy plans,” she said, “when we do not, cannot agree.”

  “You know my reasoning,” Surak began.

  “We have read your work!” she cut through his smooth, practiced arguments. “We wish no part of a pilgrimage away from the Mother World. We are bone
of her bone, heart of her heart, soul of her very soul.”

  “And if it comes to war, will thee fight?” Surak demanded. “For I tell you: I will not.”

  “Nor will we,” said the priestess. “At the worst, rather than destroy our fellows, we will stop our own hearts. So, thee will leave this place. But, before thee departs or the world we have known ends, may I present thee with a gift? It was taken from thine enemy, a product of the arts of their hands and their mind. To us, it restrains the mind from its final destiny and is therefore abomination.”

  “But I may wish to study it?” Surak lifted both his slanted eyebrows. “And, incidentally, serve thee by removing blasphemy from thy presence? What can I do but obey? Indeed, I wish to see this artifact. More to the point, if thee wishes to give me a gift, what can I do but accept with thanks?” Surak asked. He bowed again, his earlier resistance gone.

  The priestess nodded. One of the Unbonded approached. In her joined hands, she bore something a crown much like the one the high priestess wore, except it was far more splendid, dazzling with a profusion of green gems wound with bloodmetal.

  The adept of Gol regarded it with profound disgust. “Do you know what that thing is?” he demanded of Surak.

  “How should I?” Surak replied. “Logic would require me to examine it before forming a hypothesis.”

  The young priestess approached Surak. He bowed at her approach. Looking away, avoiding all but the most necessary contact with his fingertips, she handed him the crown. Karatek and Skamandros edged in at his shoulders.

  Surak traced the bloodmetal wires—circuitry, Karatek thought—that encircled the crown. He caught Surak’s eye.

  “You are the engineer. Tell me what you think,” Surak demanded.

  “That wiring looks functional, not ornamental.” Karatek made himself laugh shortly, although his mouth was dry from tension as well as the long climb.

  “The ornamentation is te-Vikram. But the wiring? It looks like some sort of generator to me. Crystals, wires…what does that remind me of? Ah!” He thought back to the days when he had begun his study of the history of engineering. “The pattern resembles a transmitter!”