The Myst Reader

by Rand; Robyn Miller; David Wingrove

  “I wanted to give each of you something,” Atrus said gently. “To remember us by.”

  Atrus stood and went across, lifting three small parcels from the table at the side. Catherine had noticed them earlier and guessed what they were. Books. D’ni Books.

  He returned, then leaned across the table, setting a parcel before each of them, then sat again, waiting for them to open them. But none of them made even the vaguest movement to unwrap the gifts.

  “Well?” Atrus said after a moment, clearly trying to understand what was going on. “Have I done the wrong thing?”

  It was Marrim who answered him. “We thank you for the gifts, Master Atrus, but we cannot accept them. We have finished with all that now, and we must settle here, in Averone.”

  But Catherine saw the look of longing in her eyes, quickly suppressed, and felt almost giddy at the thought of what they were doing here. Atrus and she had not even begun to imagine the effect they would have on these young people.

  She looked away, unable to bear it any longer. Yet even as she did there was a knock on the door.

  Atrus looked up, even as the young Averonese turned in their seats.

  The door swung slowly open.

  “Gevah!” Atrus said, standing and giving a tiny bow.

  The old man looked about him, taking in the situation at a glance, then, with a nod to Atrus and Catherine, he stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  “Forgive me for intruding,” he began, “but I have come from a meeting of the elders.”

  Catherine saw the three young people deflate at the words. If there had been any glimmer of hope, it had died in that moment.

  “They asked me to come at once,” Gevah continued, “before a great mistake was made.”

  Atrus blinked, then. “You can tell the elders that I will keep my word. These presents are but a token. I…”

  “You misunderstand me, Master Atrus,” Gevah said, interrupting him. “The mistake I am talking of is not yours but ours. You have been as good as your word. No, we have discussed the matter at length and are of one mind. The link must remain open.”

  Atrus simply stared at the old man. The young people were also staring, but their eyes were bright now and there were the ghosts of disbelieving smiles on their faces.

  “Averone must remain Averone,” Gevah said, “so it is right that the workshops should be pulled down. But there have been other changes. Changes that cannot be pulled down and raked over.”

  Gevah looked at the three young people who were sitting there and smiled.

  “Oh, we are old, but we are not stupid. We have eyes, yes, and imaginations, too. We see how you have changed, and we are proud of you, just as Master Atrus is proud of you.”

  Catherine could contain herself no longer. “Then they can come with us? To Chroma’Agana? And D’ni?”

  Gevah turned to her. “On one condition. That they return here, one month in two, to serve as teachers to our young, to pass on the skills they have learned.”

  And now, as one, the three jumped up, whooping elatedly and hugging each other, crying with joy. Even old Gevah was included in their hugs.

  When things had died down, Atrus asked, “What made you change your mind, Gevah?”

  The old man smiled. “The fact that you did what you had promised you would do, and without protest. It made us think. It made us see how much we had to lose if you were gone.”

  Atrus stood, then came round the table and embraced the old man. “Then let it be so. We shall take great care of these young people. And they will return, to pass on what they know. They will make you doubly proud of them, Gevah.”

  “I know,” the old man said, stepping back, his eyes dwelling long on the three young people. “In fact, I am certain of it.”

  §

  It was very late when Atrus and Catherine returned to their stall in the great lodge house. Now that the link was to remain, the feast had been a merry one, all of their young helpers in such a mood that it was hard to believe that they had all just volunteered for yet more years of long and grueling work.

  Settling down beside Catherine, Atrus yawned, then gave a small chuckle.

  “What now?” Catherine whispered, snuggling in to his side.

  He looked up at the great raftered roof of the lodge house high above and grinned. “The look on Marrim’s face when she finally opened her present,” he whispered. “Why, you’d have thought I’d wrapped up the sun itself and given it to her!”

  Catherine nodded thoughtfully, then. “She’s a hungry one. Starving for knowledge and for strange exotic places. Oh, I know that hunger, Atrus.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly, conscious of the hundreds of sleeping Averonese surrounding them. “And now she’ll have a chance. We can teach her, Catherine. Teach her how to write.”

  “Yes…”

  Atrus was silent for a long time after that. He lay there on his back, his arm curled about Catherine, unable to sleep, staring up into the dark, thinking about what lay ahead.

  The breakthrough to D’ni was only the first step. The real work had yet to begin—the gathering in of the Books, the searching of the Ages. It would be a slow, laborious task.

  Catherine must have sighed, though she was unaware of it. Atrus lifted himself up onto one elbow and looked down into her face. “What is it?” he whispered.

  She met his eyes. “What if no one survived? What if we’re alone?”

  “We won’t know—not until we’ve tried. But I can’t believe there aren’t some D’ni somewhere. Can you?”

  She smiled, calmed by his certainty. “No.”

  “Good,” he said. “We’ll worry about all that in the morning.”

  §

  “Marrim! Marrim! Look at this! Have you ever seen the like?”

  Marrim squeezed past Irras then stopped dead, astonished by the sight that met her eyes.

  “Books!”

  The long, low room was filled to bursting with books: on shelves on the walls, in piles on the floor, and on both desks; even stacked up on the tall-backed chair that rested behind the bigger of the desks. More books than she had ever dared imagine. Why, she could spend years in this one room alone and never read half of them!

  She turned, excited, to find Atrus standing there.

  “Master Atrus…”

  He stepped past her, looking about him.

  “This was my father’s room,” he said. “His study.”

  Atrus walked across and lifted something from among the books on the desk—an elaborate-looking pipe. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed, then placed it back, a strange expression on his face.

  “He must have been a clever man,” Irras offered.

  Atrus turned. “Clever…yes.” But he said no more.

  “There are Books here,” he said after a moment, his pale eyes narrowed. “D’ni Books. There might be functional Ages in some of them. Marrim, go through the shelves and the piles on the floor. Gather them together. But don’t be tempted by them. Some of these worlds are dangerous. That’s why we use the suit, remember? Your task is to locate them and bring them to me. Afterward, when all are gathered in, we can decide which ones to visit.”

  The two youngsters nodded.

  “By the way,” Atrus said, “where’s Carrad?”

  “With Catherine,” Irras answered. “They found a boat. They’re trying to repair it.”

  “Ah…” Atrus nodded, but Marrim, watching him, noticed how distant he seemed.

  Atrus was silent a moment, then: “My father was a secretive man. Maybe he has hidden things somewhere in the room. Search everything. The walls, the floors, everything.” He paused. “You know what you’re looking for?”

  “We know,” Marrim said.

  “Good.” Atrus nodded, then quickly left.

  Marrim turned full circle, excited once again now that Atrus had gone. “All these books,” she said, looking at Irras. “Just imagine…”

  §

  Catherine looke
d across as Atrus came down the stone steps into the lamp-lit cavern.

  “Marrim said you’d found a boat,” he said, his voice echoing slightly in that enclosed space.

  “Yes,” she said, glancing to her side, where Carrad was busy repairing the hull of the ancient craft, his closely shaven head bobbing up and down as he worked. “It needs a little care and attention, but Carrad knows all about making boats.”

  “Good.” Atrus stepped down onto the quay. The lamp on the wall behind him threw his shadow across the bright surface of the water. He stood there saying nothing, but something in his manner told her that he wanted to talk.

  Reaching beside her, she touched Carrad’s arm. “Ill not be long.” Then, straightening up, she went over to Atrus.

  “Come,” she said. “Let’s go outside.”

  The main cavern was dark and silent. “Sepulchral” was the word that sprang to her mind; like a single great building that had been long abandoned by its gigantic owners. Sitting there on the stone ledge, looking out across the still, flat surface of the water toward the ancient city, Catherine understood for the first time why Atrus had been driven to return.

  “It must be difficult for you, coming back here.”

  “I was only a child,” he answered, his eyes looking past her toward the great twist of rock on the far side of the cavern. “I didn’t understand just how much he had twisted things in his mind. I had to unlearn so much that he taught me. I thought I’d thrown him off, but his shadow is everywhere here. I wasn’t so conscious of it when we made the breakthrough, but today, standing in his room, I could almost see him…”

  “Then maybe that’s why you’re here. To throw off his shadow.”

  He was silent a while, then: “What I really fear is that he’s already destroyed all of the Books.”

  “Why should he do that?”

  “It’s just something I remember him saying. He used to warn me against using the Books. He said they were unstable and that it would be dangerous to venture into those Ages. But that was a lie. Those Books were all proper Books, approved by the Guilds, checked regularly by the Maintainers. They would have been carefully written—designed to be stable. And he would have known that. So why warn me about them unless he didn’t want me going into them and finding other D’ni?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean he destroyed them.”

  “Maybe not. But I know how he thought. He had no respect for them. And on our Book searches, though he never brought back anything but blank Books, he always noted down where the Books were.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I fear that we’ll look and look and find nothing, because there’ll be nothing to find. You know the depth of his malice, Catherine. You of all people should know that he was quite capable of something like that. Even so…”

  Atrus turned, the sentence incomplete. Catherine looked up and saw that Marrim was standing in the doorway.

  “What is it? Atrus asked, going over to her.

  “This,” Marrim said, handing Atrus a notebook. “I found it tucked away at the back of one of the drawers.”

  He stared at it, amazed. “But this…”

  “…was your father’s,” Catherine said, stepping up beside him. She opened it, flicking through the pages quickly, then handed it back.

  “Maybe it’s here,” she said.

  Decades of understanding between the two made him understand her at once. “His journals?”

  “One of his journals,” she said. “You say he kept a record of the Book searches. Well, maybe it’s here. If so, we’ll know where to look. It could save us weeks.”

  “Yes.” Yet as Atrus looked back at the notebook his face darkened.

  “Shadows…” he said.

  “Yes,” Catherine answered him. “But these shadows might just cast some light.”

  §

  Sensing that Atrus needed to be left for a time, Catherine took the three young Averonese back to Chroma’Agana, then returned alone.

  She found him in his father’s study, seated at Gehn’s desk, the notebook open before him.

  Atrus looked up as she came in and sighed. “It’s all here,” he said. “Diaries, observations, notes to Ages he was writing. And other things.”

  “And the maps?”

  He shook his head. “Catherine?...Have you ever read of the Great King?”

  “No…Unless they mean Kerath.”

  “I don’t think so. My father’s notes are unclear, but it appears he existed long before the late kings.”

  “What is that?” She asked, reaching out to take the notebook.

  “My father’s notes on the myths and legends of D’ni. Some of it’s quite detailed, other parts, like the mention of the Great King, are vague. From the notations at the back of the book it seems that Gehn trawled all kinds of sources. It’s a regular hodgepodge of fact and rumor, but a lot of it reads like old wives’ tales. You know the kind of thing…fireside tales, invented to make children’s eyes pop!”

  Catherine was turning the pages, reading an entry here, an entry there. “So why the interest in this Great King?”

  “Because I’ve never heard mention of him before, and because he was supposed to have made various prophesies.”

  “Prophesies?”

  “Again, it’s vague. But there are one or two instances scattered throughout the book. Here…” He took the book back and quickly searched through the early pages, returning it to her a moment later. “That entry there, in green ink.”

  Catherine read it through, then looked up at him. “It’s strange, certainly.”

  She closed the book, then set it down. “I don’t think anyone can see clearly what lies ahead.”

  “Nor I.”

  §

  They moored the boat at the foot of the granite steps and carried their equipment up. Behind the great sweep of marbled flagstones that bordered the harbor was an open space that had once been a great square. There they set up camp, clearing away the debris, then placed a ring of lamps about them, the ancient fire-marbles burning brightly in that perpetual twilight.

  Standing at the foot of the great curved slope of buildings that rose level after level, climbing the cavern’s massive walls, Marrim felt a mixture of awe and sorrow: awe at the scale on which the D’ni had once built; sorrow that she had not witnessed it in its living splendor.

  It was strange, of course, for she was used to the shadows falling downward—the natural shadows of a sunlit world—whereas here everything was underlit, the faint glow from the water giving the whole place an eerie feel. Everywhere she looked was ruin. Ruin beyond anything she had imagined possible. Cracked walls and fallen masonry. And here and there huge pits, large enough to swallow up whole mansions. Strange mosses had begun to grow in the cracks, and here and there an odd lichen splashed subdued color on a rock.

  Overall it had a strange, desolate beauty, and when Atrus came and stood beside her, she asked him what had happened to cause such devastation.

  Atrus had never spoken to them of this, and, listening to the tale—a tale Atrus’s grandmother had first told him long after the event—Marrim found her imagination waking so that she could almost see the dark cloud slowly fill the cavern, and, afterward, Veovis and his ally, A’Gaeris, as they walked through the stricken alleyways of D’ni, their cart of death pushed before them.

  When Atrus had finished, Marrim turned to him. “Master Atrus…why didn’t they come back?”

  “Perhaps they did.”

  Yes, she thought. And saw this. And hurried back to the Ages in which they had found safe haven, knowing that D’ni was at an end.

  Catherine, who had been organizing the laying out of the bedrolls, now came across. “Shall we go and have a look?” she asked, gesturing toward the nearby streets.

  “Marrim?” Atrus asked, turning to her. “Would you like to come with us?”

  Marrim nodded, surprised that he’d asked. “Are we to begin the search?”

&nbs
p; “Not today. Tomorrow, maybe, once things are better organized. I just thought you might like to look about a little before we begin in earnest.” He reached down and, picking up one of the lamps, handed it to her. “Here, Marrim. Light our way.”

  Marrim took the lamp and, holding it up, led them on, across the littered square toward a crumbling stone archway that marked the entrance to the lowest of D’ni’s many districts.

  “This is Kerathen, named after the last king,” he said, pointing up to the symbols carved into the partly fallen lintel of the arch. “This is where the D’ni boatmen once lived, and the traders and innkeepers.”

  “And A’Gaeris,” Marrim said, staring through the arch wide-eyed, as if at paradise itself.

  “Yes. And A’Gaeris.”

  §

  They walked for an hour, then stopped, resting on the balcony of a two-story house, the windows of which were on a level with the top of the great arch that formed a giant gateway to the harbor. Looking down from there, Atrus recalled the first time he had stood there, with his father, in what seemed several lifetimes ago.

  Even Marrim was subdued now. And not surprisingly. The sheer extent of the devastation was overwhelming. It was enough to eclipse the brightest spirit.

  “It’s too much,” Catherine said quietly. “We cannot repair this.”

  But Atrus shook his head. “It only seems too much. We have a whole lifetime to work at this. Not only that, but we shall find others to help us in the task.”

  Marrim, who had been looking out across the lake, now turned and looked to him. “How many people were there, here in D’ni, Master Atrus?”

  “A million. Maybe more.”

  The thought of it clearly amazed her. “And all of them could write?”

  “It depends what you mean. The D’ni were highly literate, but few could write Ages. That was something the Guilds taught. One would have needed to be a Guildsman to do that.”