The Myst Reader

by Rand; Robyn Miller; David Wingrove

  “The sprayer, you mean?” Kedri said, staring at Aitrus in open astonishment.

  Aitrus nodded.

  Kedri crouched, staring at the bright red cylinder in awe, conscious of the immense power of these simple-seeming machines, then, like a school-boy who has been briefly let off the leash, he straightened up and, looking about him, began to gather up rocks and feed into the machine.

  §

  That night Master Telanis took Aitrus aside once more.

  “I hear our friends enjoyed themselves today. That was a good idea of yours to let them operate a few of the less dangerous machines. They’re bookish types, and such types are impressed by gadgetry. And who knows, even something this small may serve to sway them for the good.”

  “Then you think it is good?”

  “Making contact with the surface-dwellers?” Telanis smiled. “Yes. Just so long as it is done discreetly.”

  Aitrus frowned. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, I do not think we should mix our race with theirs. Nor should we think of any extended relationship with them. They are likely, after all, to be a primitive race, and primitive races—as we have learned to our cost—tend to be warlike in nature. It would not do to have them pouring down our tunnels into D’ni.”

  “But what kind of relationship does that leave us?”

  Telanis shrugged, then. “We could go among them as Observers. That is, providing we are not too dissimilar from them as a species.”

  ‘But why? What would we learn from doing that?”

  “They might have certain cultural traits—artifacts and the like—that we might use. Or they might even have developed certain instruments or machines, though, personally, I find that most unlikely.”

  “It seems, then, that Master Kedri is right after all, and that ours is something of a fool’s errand.”

  Master Telanis sat forward, suddenly alert. “Are those his words?”

  “Something like. It was something he was saying to one of the other Observers—Ja’ir, I think—as they were coming away from the rock face. Ja’ir was wondering aloud whether there was anyone up there on the surface anyway.”

  “And?”

  Aitrus paused, trying to recall the conversation. “Master Kedri was of the opinion that there would be. His view was that the climatic conditions are ideal for the development of an indigenous species.”

  “And on what did he base this claim?”

  “It seems that all four of them have seen copies of the Book.”

  “The Book of Earth,” Telanis said, nodding thoughtfully. “It was written by Grand Master Ri’Neref himself, Aitrus, perhaps the greatest of the ancient Writers. Yet it is said that it was one he wrote as an apprentice.”

  “So Master Kedri also claimed. Yet most troubling, perhaps, was what Master Ja’ir said next.”

  Telanis’s eyes seemed to pierce Aitrus. “Go on.”

  “Ja’ir said that whether there was a humanoid race up there on the surface or not he nevertheless wondered whether so much time and effort ought to have been spent on such a speculative venture.”

  “Speculative…he said speculative, did he?”

  Aitrus nodded.

  Master Telanis sat back and stared thoughtfully. For a while he did not speak, then, looking at Aitrus, he asked, “And what do you think, Aitrus? Is it worth it?”

  “Yes, Guild Master. To know for certain that we are sharing a world with another intelligent species—that surely is worth twice the time and effort that we have given it!”

  §

  While the excavation was in process, the young guildsmen had been permitted to return to their quarters on the ships, while the Observers had been moved into the Guild Master’s cabin in the second excavator.

  Aitrus returned to his bunk. Briefly he smiled, thinking of Kedri’s comment, but the smile quickly faded. The endless secondary process of clearing up normally gave him time to think of his experiments, something he had little time to do these past few days. Indeed, it made him wonder how others could stand to live as Kedri so clearly lived, constantly in someone else’s pocket.

  Personally, he needed space, and quiet. Yes, and an adequate supply of chemicals and notebooks! he thought, recollecting how his mother used to tease him about his obsession with rocks and geological processes.

  Unnatural, she had said, but the old cook, Master Jerahl, was right, there was nothing more natural for a D’ni. Stone was their element.

  As he sat on the edge of his bunk, he could hear the whine of drills and the sudden crunch as rock fell to the floor. Let others think birdsong and the sound of a river flowing were natural; for him, this was the most natural of sounds.

  “Young worm,” his father had called him as a child, as if anticipating his future calling, and so he had become. A burrower. A seeker of passages. An explorer of the dark.

  Aitrus stood, meaning to undress for sleep, when there came the sound of a commotion outside. He hurried along the corridor and poked his head out, looking about him. It was coming from inside the tunnel. The sound of a human in pain.

  He heard a scuffling behind him. A moment later, Master Telanis joined him in the doorway.

  “What is it, Aitrus?”

  “Someone’s hurt.”

  The two men ran across. At the tunnel’s mouth, one of the young engineers met them, his face distraught.

  “Who is it, Ta’nerin?” Telanis asked, holding his arms.

  “It’s Efanis. The cutting tip shattered. He’s badly hurt. We’ve tried to staunch the blood but we can’t stop it!”

  “Fetch Master Avonis at once. I’ll see what I can do!”

  Letting Ta’nerin go, Master Telanis ran, Aitrus close behind. The tunnel was almost finished now. Only the last 5 spans remained uncut. There, at the far end, beneath the burning arc lamps, they could see a small group of cadets gathered—some kneeling, some standing—around one of their colleagues.

  The moaning grew—an awful, piteous sound.

  As the two men came up, they saw just how badly Efanis was injured. The wound was awful. The shattered tip must have flown back and hit Efanis full in the chest and upper arm. He had not stood a chance. Even as they stood there he gave a great groan. Blood was on his lips.

  Pushing between the guildsmen, Master Telanis tore off his shirt and poked it into the wound. Then, looking about him, he spoke urgently, trying to rouse them from their shock. “Help me, then, lads! Quick now!” And, reaching down, he gently cradled Efanis’s head even as the others crowded around, putting their hands under Efanis’s shoulders and back and thighs.

  “That’s good,” Telanis said softly, encouraging them as they gently lifted the groaning Efanis. “Now let’s get him back to the excavator. The sooner Master Avonis gets to look at him, the better.”

  §

  There had been accidents before, but never anything more severe than broken bones, or bruising, or rock splinters. Master Telanis prided himself on his safety record. Efanis’s accident had thus come as a great shock.

  When Aitrus reported to Kedri the next morning, it was to find the Legislator crouched over a desk in the chart room, writing. He looked up as Aitrus entered and put down his pen.

  “I’m sorry, Aitrus. I understand that Efanis was your friend. A bad business, eh?”

  Aitrus nodded, but he felt unable to speak. Efanis was not yet out of trouble.

  “I’ll not be needing you today, Aitrus, so take the day off. Do your experiments, if you wish. We’ll carry on tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Leaving Kedri to his work, Aitrus went straight to Master Telanis. He found him in the tunnel, crouching beside the temporarily abandoned excavation, staring at a dark patch in the rock. At the center of that small, irregular ovoid was a tiny, slightly flattened circle of what looked like glass.

  It had the look of a bruised eye staring from the rock.

  “What is that?” Aitrus asked.

  Telanis looked up at him. “It app
ears to be a pyroclastic deposit—a ‘volcanic bomb’ deposited in this strata hundreds of millions of years ago.” The Guild Master pointed to the outer, darker area. “The outside of it is simple obsidian—a glassy basalt—but this pellucid nugget here was already embedded within it when the volcano spat it out. It looks and feels like diamond.”

  Aitrus nodded.

  “My guess,” Telanis continued, “is that the cutting tip slipped on the glassy surface, then snagged on this much harder patch here and shattered.”

  He sighed heavily. “I should have taken core samples, Aitrus. I was in too much of a hurry to impress our guests. And now this has come of it.”

  “You cannot blame yourself, Guild Master,” Aitrus said. “The bit must have been flawed, anyway. One cannot foresee everything.”

  “No?” Telanis stood. He looked about him at the abandoned tools, his eyes, for the first time that Aitrus could recall, troubled by what he saw. “If not me, then who, Aitrus? It is my job to ensure the safety of my crews, my responsibility, no one else’s. That Efanis is hurt is my fault. If I had done my job properly…”

  Aitrus put out his hand to touch his Master’s arm, then withdrew it. In a sense Telanis was right. All of their patient checks and procedures were designed to avoid an event like this.

  He cleared his throat. “Master Kedri says he does not need me today, Guild Master. I came to be reassigned.”

  Telanis glanced at him, then made a vague gesture with his hand. “Not now, Aitrus. We’ll do no work today.”

  “But, Master…”

  “Not now.”

  §

  Aitrus packed a knapsack for the journey and set off, walking back down the nodes to where—almost two months before—they had drilled through a small cave system.

  Though they had labored long and hard in the rock, it took but an hour or so to reach his destination. For the first part the way was fairly straightforward, zigzagging back and forth in the normal D’ni way, but then it branched to the left, where they had been forced to detour around an area of folds and faults.

  His way was dimly lit. Chemicals in the green-black coating of D’ni rock gave off a faint luminescence bright enough to see in. But Aitrus had packed two lamps and a small canister of luminescent algae for when he left the D’ni path.

  Coming to his destination, he rested briefly, seated on the rock ledge outside the circular door that led through into the cave system, and ate a brief meal.

  The sphere of this node had been peppered with openings—some tiny apertures barely large enough to poke one’s hand into, others big enough to walk inside. One—the one he now sat outside—had been large enough to drive the excavator inside. Indeed, with Master Telanis’s permission, they had shored up the entrance and bored almost fifty spans into the rock, widening the passageway to give access to a large cavern that lay just beyond. But time had been pressing and they had not had more than a day or two to explore the system before they had had to press on with their excavations. They had sealed the tunnel with a small gate—similar to those that linked the nodes to the lengths of D’ni tunnel—leaving the caverns for future investigation, then they had sprayed the rest of the node with a smooth coating of nara.

  Aitrus had made extensive notes of the cave system at the time. Now he had the chance to go back and resume his explorations. The thought of it cheered him as, finishing his meal, he stood and, taking the protective helmet from his pack, he strapped it on and, slipping the sack onto his shoulder, walked over to the lock.

  It was a simple pressure lock. Turning the wheel, he could hear the air hiss out from the vent overhead. A moment later a crack appeared down the very center of the door and the two halves of it slid back into the surrounding collar.

  Inside was darkness.

  In a small cloth bag he carried in his pocket he had a collection of fire-marbles. Taking one from the bag, he opened the back of the lamp mounted on his helmet and popped it into the tiny space. Clicking it shut, he waited for a moment until the fire-marble began to glow. After less than a minute a clear, strong white radiance shone out from the lamp into the darkness, revealing the smooth, uncoated walls of rock within.

  Atrus smiled, then stepped inside.

  §

  Aitrus paused to spray a tiny arrow on the rock wall, pointing back the way he had come, then slipped the canister away and walked slowly on, counting each step, all the time turning his head from side to side, scanning the walls and floor ahead of him.

  After a moment he stopped again and took his notebook from his pocket, quickly marking down how many paces he had come before checking his compass again to see if the tunnel had diverged from its slow descent.

  It was a narrow passageway, one they had not explored the first time he had been here. Overhead it tapered to a crack that seemed to go some way into the rock, but it was barely wide enough to walk down, and it was slowly narrowing. Up ahead, however, it seemed to emerge into a larger space—a small cavern, perhaps—and so he persevered, hoping he might squeeze through and investigate.

  The rock was silent. There were no waterflows here, no steady drip from unseen heights, only the absence of sound. He was the intruder here, the noise of his own breathing loud in his ears. It was warm in the rock and he felt no fear. Since he’d been a child and his father had first taken him deep inside the rock, he had felt no fear. What he felt, if anything, was a tiny thrill of anticipation.

  There was hidden beauty in the rock. Locked deep within the earth were caverns of such delicate, shimmering beauty that, to step out into them, was a joy beyond all measuring.

  Taking his sack from his shoulders, he dropped it softly onto the floor of the passage, then turned and began to squeeze into the narrow space. Breathing in, he found he could just slip through.

  He turned, then grabbed hold of the rock beside him. Just below him the rock fell away into a narrow chasm. To his left it climbed to meet a solid wall of rock. But to his right…

  Aitrus grinned. To his right, just beyond the gap, the cavern opened out. Points of shimmering crystal seemed to wink back at him as he turned his head. The roof of the cavern was low, but the cave itself went back some way, a huge, pillarlike outcrop of rock concealing what lay at the far end.

  Aitrus turned and, squeezing back through, retrieved his sack. By the timer on his wrist he had been gone from the base-node almost three hours, but there was still plenty of time. Securing the strap of the sack about his wrist, he edged through the gap again, standing on the lip of the entrance hole.

  The gap seemed deep, but he could jump it at a stride. The trouble would be getting back, as the floor of the cave was much lower than where he stood. It would not be so easy leaping up onto this ledge.

  Taking a length of rope from his sack, Aitrus hammered a metal pin into the rock beside him and tied one end of the rope fast about it. He uncoiled the rope, letting two or three spans of it hang down, then jumped down.

  For a moment he looked about him, his eyes searching for a chunk of loose stone to lay upon the end of the rope to keep it in place, but there was nothing. The rock was strangely fused here and glassy. Aitrus coiled the end of the rope and rested it on the rock, trusting that it would not slip into the gap. Then, straightening up, he turned to face the cavern.

  For a moment Aitrus held himself perfectly still, the beam of light from his lamp focused on the pillar at the far end of the cavern, then he crouched and, again taking his notebook from his pocket, rested it on his knee, and began to sketch what he saw.

  Finished, he began to walk across. The floor was strangely smooth and for a moment Aitrus wondered if he were in a volcanic chamber of some kind. Then, with a laugh, he stopped and crouched.

  “Agates!” he said softly, his voice a whisper in that silent space. “Agates in the rock!”

  Taking a hammer and chisel from his tool belt, Aitrus chipped at the smooth surface of the rock just to his left, then, slipping the tools back into their leather holsters, he reached do
wn and gently plucked his find from the rock.

  The agate was a tiny piece of chalcedony no bigger than a pigion’s egg. He held it up and studied it, then, reaching behind him, popped it into the sack on his back. There were others here, and he quickly chipped them from the rock. Some were turquoise, others a deep summer blue. One, however, was almost purple in color and he guessed that it was possibly an amethyst.

  Aitrus smiled broadly, then stood once more. Such agates were hypabyssal—small intrusive bodies from deep in the earth’s crust that had been thrust up with the lava flow to cool at these shallow depths. In a sense they were no more than bubbles in the lava flow; bubbles that had been filled with heated groundwater. Long eons had passed and this was the form they had taken. Polished they would look magnificent.

  Aitrus began to walk toward the distant pillar of rock, but he had taken no more than two paces when the floor beneath him began to tremble. At first he thought they had perhaps begun drilling again, for the source of the vibrations seemed quite distant, but then he recalled what Master Telanis had said.

  We’ll do no work today…

  As if to emphasize the point, the ground shuddered. There was a deep rumbling in the rock. He could hear rock falling in the passage behind him.

  Aitrus walked across. If the passage collapsed, he would be trapped here, and it might be days before anyone knew where he was. He had told no one that he was off exploring.

  The rope, at least, was still where he had left it. He swung across and pulled himself up onto the ledge.

  There was the faintest trembling in the rock. A trickle of dust fell from a crack above him. He looked up. If there was to be a proper quake, that rock would come down.