The Myst Reader

by Rand; Robyn Miller; David Wingrove

  Gehn pulled his glasses down over his eyes then stepped out into the sunlight. For a long while he was silent, almost as if he disapproved of what he saw, but when he spoke, it was with an air of surprise.

  “This is good, Atrus. You appear to have chosen the different elements well. They complement each other perfectly.” He turned, looking directly at Atrus, who still stood in the shadow. “Which books did you use?”

  As ever, Gehn thought that he had derived the different elements of his Age from various ancient books, the way Gehn himself did. But Atrus hadn’t done that here. This was all his, uniquely his. The greatest trouble he’d had was in finding the right D’ni words to express what he wanted.

  That was why it had taken him so long. Why he had had to be so patient.

  “I…I can’t remember,” he said finally. “There were so many.”

  “No matter,” Gehn said. He glanced at Atrus briefl, then walked on.

  Skirting the pool, Gehn paused to look about him, then began to climb the steps. Pulling down his glasses, Atrus hurried after, surprised that Gehn had made no other comment. Didn’t all this remind him of something? Couldn’t Gehn see what he’d tried to do here?

  It was the cleft. Simplified, admittedly, and without the buildings that had been in the original, but the shape of it, the physical materials were, as far as he could make it, precisely as he remembered them.

  Halfway up the steps he stopped and turned, scanning the floor of the cleft to see whether the one specific he had written in had taken as he’d hoped. His eyes searched a moment, seeing nothing, then, with a jolt of pure delight, he saw them, just there in the deep shadow on the far side. Flowers. Tiny, delicate blue flowers.

  He grinned, then began to climb again. It had taken him a lot of time and effort choosing the precise soil type and the balance of minerals in the soil, but it had worked!

  Gehn was waiting for him up above, one hand stroking his chin as he surveyed the view.

  Joining him, Atrus looked out, seeing, for the first time, the Age he had created.

  It was a rolling landscape of hills and valleys, with lush pasture and thick, dark green forests. Rivers threaded their silver way through that verdant paradise, winking now and then into the blue of lakes. To the far left, in the distance, there were mountains—snowcapped and majestic, and beneath them a blue-green stretch of sea.

  And over all a rich blue cloudless sky, dominated by a large yellow sun, like the sun of Earth. Atrus stood there, entranced, listening to the peaceful sound of birdsong. For a moment he didn’t even notice, then he half-turned, his eyes widening.

  Birds? I didn’t write birds!

  His father stepped up beside him. “You should have experimented more.”

  Atrus looked to his father, surprised by his comment, which seemed a complete contradiction of his own style of writing.

  “You might have tried a different sun, for instance,” Gehn said, pointing to it, “or chosen a different kind of rock to make those mountains.”

  “But…”

  “Next time you should use a few less conventional touches, Atrus. It would not do to make your worlds too staid.”

  Atrus looked down, dismayed by his father’s words. But what about that view? Wasn’t that spectacular? And the air and the soil here—wasn’t it good that they were so healthy? Oh, he knew this Age was simple, but he had planned to take one step at a time. And this world wouldn’t fall apart…

  “Still,” Gehn added, “you need not keep this Age. Now that I know you can write, I shall give you other books. You can experiment in them. Then, once you have finally made an Age that I am happy with, you can call that your First Age.”

  “But I’ve named this world.”

  “Named it?” Gehn laughed dismissively. “That was a trifle premature. I could understand, perhaps, if there were people here, but…”

  “I called it Inception.”

  Gehn stared at him a moment, then turned away. Walking across, he pulled a leaf from a bush, rolling it between his gloved fingers, then lifted it to his nose to sniff it before he threw it away.

  “All right. I think we had better go back now.”

  Atrus, who had been about to walk on down the slope, turned to face his father again. “Go back?”

  Gehn barely glanced at him. “Yes.”

  “But I thought…” Atrus swallowed. “I thought we could see more of this Age. I wanted to take samples of the soil, and catch one of the creatures for study. I wanted…”

  “You heard me, Atrus. Now come! If you must, you can come back another time, but right now I must get back. I have a great deal to arrange before the Korfah V’ja.”

  Atrus had never heard the term before. “Korfah V’ja?”

  Gehn looked to him. “Tomorrow, at noon on the Thirty-seventh Age.” And with that he walked on.

  §

  Back in the library on D’ni, Gehn closed Atrus’s book and, slipping it beneath his arm, headed for the steps that led up to his study.

  “Quickly now,” he said, gesturing for Atrus to follow. “We need to prepare you.”

  The room seemed unaltered since Atrus had last seen it. If anything, it was even more untidy than before, with even more books piled about the walls. Gehn’s cloak lay, carelessly discarded, over the back of the chair beside the fireplace, the grate filled with the ashes of a recent fire.

  Atrus blinked, imagining his father working here late into the night, the flickering firelight making the shadows in the room dance.

  “Sit down,” Gehn said, pointing to the chair across the desk from him. “We have much to do before the morning.”

  Atrus sat, watching as Gehn put his book down on the pile at the side of his desk, then peeled the glasses from the top of his head and stuffed them into the drawer beside him.

  “Father?”

  “Yes, Atrus?”

  “What is the Korfah V’ja?”

  Gehn barely glanced at him. He took a book from the side, then set out a Writing pen and an ink pot on the desk beside it. “It is a ceremony for a new god,” he answered, sitting down and opening the book.

  The book was not blank. It was already written in. From where he sat, Atrus could see that the last two entries had been added to the page only recently.

  “I don’t know…”

  Gehn looked at him. “Of course you know.”

  He took the ink pot and unscrewed the top, then looked across at his son. “You are a true D’ni now, Atrus. A Writer. You have made an Age. That fact ought to be recognized. Besides, it does not do to become too familiar with the peoples of our worlds. They must be reminded of our godhood now and then, and what better way than a ceremony?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “I am arranging something special for the occasion.”

  Gehn hesitated a moment, his eyes half-closed, thinking, then dipped then pen into the pot.

  “What are you doing, father?”

  “Making changes.”

  “Changes?”

  Gehn nodded. “Small ones. Things you cannot see.”

  “Then that…” Atrus pointed, “is the Age Thirty-seven book?”

  “Yes.”

  Atrus felt himself go cold. He thought Gehn had finished with making changes. He thought that Age was “fixed.”

  “Father?”

  Gehn glanced at him distractedly. “What is it, Atrus?”

  “What you said, about me being less conventional in my writing. What did you mean exactly? Did you mean I ought to take more risks?”

  Gehn looked up, then set his pen aside. “Not risks, so much, as… Well, let me be blunt with you, Atrus: you take too long about things. Far, far too long. These copybooks,” he gestured toward the stack beside him, “there’s barely a thing in most of them! When I gave you the choice of five, I knew which one you would pick, because it was the only one that was even vaguely like a proper Age!”

  Gehn stood, leaning over his desk. “Dammit, boy, you should have made a
dozen, twenty Ages by now! You should have experimented a little, tried out a few things to see what worked and what didn’t. Sticking to the tried-and-tested, that is all well and good for scribes, but not for us, Atrus! Not for us!”

  Atrus stared At Gehn, bewildered by the patent contradiction in his father’s words. Did his father want quick worlds or stable worlds? Or something else entirely?

  Gehn huffed, exasperated. “You are no good to me if you work at this pace all the time. I need Ages. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them! That is our task, Atrus, don’t you see? Our sacred task. To make Ages and populate them. To fill up the nothingness with worlds. Worlds we can own and govern, so that the D’ni will be great again. So that my grandsons will be lords of a million worlds!”

  Gehn stood there a moment longer, his eyes piercing Atrus, then he sat, shaking his head slowly, as if disappointed.

  “You had best go to your room now. I shall send Rijus down to see you. He will bring you the special clothes you are to wear for the ceremony.”

  §

  Something was wrong. They knew it even as they stepped out beneath the dark, cloud-dominated sky of the Thirty-seventh Age. As they stood there, a warm, unsavory wind blew into their faces, gusting as if from a vent, its normal strong salinity tainted by other, more bitter presences.

  Atrus looked to his father and saw how Gehn grimaced then touched his tongue against his upper palate, as if to get a better taste of that unwholesome air.

  “What is it?”

  Gehn concentrated a moment longer, then, ignoring Atrus’s question, strode on. But he had not gone more than a dozen paces before he stopped dead, his whole face drained of expression, his lips parting the merest fraction.

  Atrus walked across and stood beside his father on the ridge, looking out over the village and the lake, shocked by what he saw.

  The lake was dry, its exposed surface filled with dark cracks. Two dozen fishing boats lay on their sides in the bone-dry mud.

  Atrus turned, looking toward the sea. There, through the gap in the hills, where the channel ended and the sea had once begun, was a ledge of solid rock. Dry rock, crusted with dried up seaweed and barnacled rocks.

  Like a desert scrubland, he thought, recalling the first time he had had the thought, in the boat with Tarkuk and his son.

  And beyond that ledge…nothing. Only air.

  A great sound of wailing and groaning came up to them on the wind. Atrus looked, trying to locate its source in the village, but the village was deserted. Then, suddenly, he saw them, on the other side of the bridge, in front of the meeting hut. They were all there, huddled together in fear, staring out across the gouged eye of the lake or looking woefully up at the black and hostile sky. Only Koena stood, moving among them, bending down to talk to this one or lay his hand upon that one’s arm.

  “What’s happened here?” he asked, turning to Gehn once more.

  Gehn slowly shook his head. There was a look of disbelief in his face. “It was all right,” he said quietly. “We fixed it. Those phrases…there was nothing wrong with them.”

  And yet something was wrong. Something had drained the lake and left the island stranded above the level of the surrounding ocean. Something had caused that. It must have. Because things like this did not happen on their own.

  A phrase swam into Atrus’s mind. He made the ocean warm…

  Was that it? Had that seemingly small alteration set up a contradiction? Or, to achieve it, had Gehn tampered with some other crucial element in this Age? Had he tilted the axis of the planet, perhaps, to bring it closer to the sun so that the water was warmer? Or was it something else? What if he’d tampered with the plates beneath the ocean? What if Gehn had set up a weakness in the ocean floor that had finally succumbed to the great pressures down there, causing this lowering of the ocean’s level? Or what if he had simply picked a phrase from a D’ni book that referred to a warm ocean without understanding where it came from or what its context was?

  He would never know. Not without consulting the Age Thirty-seven book, and Gehn was quite adamant that he was not to read his books.

  Great black-fisted thunderclouds were gathering overhead now. There was the low grumble of thunder.

  Looking about him, his face much harder than it had been only moments before, Gehn began to walk slowly down the hill toward the village.

  §

  “But Great Master, you have to help us. You must!”

  “Must?” Gehn turned his head and stared at the kneeling man disdainfully. “Who says I must?”

  An hour had passed since they had come and Gehn sat in his chair, at his desk in the great tent, the glowing pipe cradled in his hands.

  The first thing Gehn had done was to send the islanders back to their huts, forbidding them to set a foot outside, then he had come here and lit his pipe. Since then he had not moved, but had sat there, silently brooding, his brows heavily knitted.

  And Koena had come to petition his Master; afraid to defy his command, yet equally afraid to leave things be. His world was dying and there was only one person who could save it—the Lord Gehn.

  Atrus, standing just behind Koena, felt a great wave of respect and admiration for the man swell up in him.

  “Forgive me, Master,” Koena began again, his eyes not daring to meet Gehn’s, “but have we angered you somehow? Is this our punishment? If so, tell us how we might make amends. But please, I beg you, save us. Bring back the sea and fill the lake for us, Master, I implore you!”

  Gehn slammed the pipe down on the desk and stood. “Enough!”

  He seemed to take a long, indrawn breath, then slowly stepped around the table until he stood over the cowering Koena.

  “You are right,” Gehn said, his voice cold and imperious. “This is a punishment. A demonstration of my awesome powers.”

  Gehn paused, then, turning his back on the man, began to pace the floor. “I thought it necessary to show you what would happen should you ever think to defy me. I felt it…appropriate.”

  Atrus stared at his father, openmouthed, in the silence that followed.

  Gehn made a slow circuit of the tent, moving behind Atrus as if he wasn’t there. Then, as if the thought followed on from the last, he threw a question at Keona. “Are the preparations complete?”

  “Master?” The kneeling man dared the smallest glance.

  “The preparations,” Gehn repeated, as if speaking to a child, “for the ceremony.”

  Koena blinked, then nodded; then, realizing what he had done, he hastily dropped his head again and said, “Yes, Master. Everything is ready.”

  “Then we shall hold the ceremony in an hour. You will gather the islanders on the slope in front of the temple.”

  “The temple?” Then Koena understood. Gehn meant the meeting hut. Even so, he seemed rooted to the spot.

  “Well?” Gehn said, turning around so that he faced his servant again. “Had you not better go and arrange things?”

  “Master?” Koena’s face was suddenly a blank. He seemed bemused, in shock.

  “I said go. Gather the villagers and prepare for the ceremony. I do not wish to be kept waiting.”

  Koena backed away a little. “But Master…aren’t you going to help us? The lake…”

  “Go!” Gehn yelled, his face dark with fury. His hand had gone down to his waist and produced a long dagger from beneath his cloak. “Now! Before I slit you open like a fish!”

  Koena’s head jerked up, his eyes staring fearfully at the razor-sharp blade; then, with a tiny bow, he turned and almost ran from the tent.

  Atrus took a step toward him. “Father?”

  But Gehn wasn’t listening. He stared blackly at the tent flap where Koena had just departed, then made a sour movement of his mouth. He glanced at Atrus, as if looking at a book or some other object he had forgotten he had placed there, then, sheathing the knife, turned and went back to his desk.

  Picking up his pipe, he drew deeply in it, then sat back, resting his neck again
st the back of the chair and closing his eyes.

  “Father?”

  But Gehn was impervious to words. Pursing his lips, he blew a long stream of smoke into the air.

  An hour. The Korfah V’ja—the god-crowning ceremony—was in an hour.

  §

  Koena had gathered the islanders, all two hundred of them, and made them kneel, heads bowed, on the slope before the meeting hut. Five great torches burned on the top of tall poles that were set into the ground between the people and the hut, their flames gusting and flickering in the wind. Deep shadows danced in that mesmeric light, like an evil spirit searching among that gathered mass for one specific soul to torment.

  They were mainly silent, cowering beneath the mass of dark and threatening clouds, yet each growl or rumble of that heavenly chorus provoked a corresponding moan from those frightened souls.

  At the prearranged signal, Koena turned and raised his arms, calling upon the god to come down. At once, Gehn stepped from the darkness between the wooden pillars, resplendent in a long, flowing cloak of pure gold thread lined with black silk, his white hair framed by a strange, pentagonal halo of gold that flashed in the flickering torchlight.

  “People of the Thirty-seventh Age,” he commanded, his voice booming over the noises of the storm, “prostrate yourselves before your new Master, the Great Lord Atrus.”

  Reluctantly, Atrus came down the steps until he stood beside his father. He was wearing a cloak and halo much like Gehn’s, only his were a brilliant red, the material shining transparently, as though it were made of a million tiny rubies.

  In genuine awe, the people pressed their foreheads to the earth, murmuring the words the acolyte had had them prepare.

  “The Lord Atrus is our Master. He blesses us with his presence.”

  Gehn beamed, then called to the two men still inside the temple. “Attendants! Come!”

  Slowly, with great ceremony, the two attendants—recruited from among the fishermen—came from within the temple, carrying between them on a velvet cushion an astonishing pendant of precious metals and bloodred jewels and delicate porcelain.