“You had no choice.”
“Didn’t I? You see, that’s just it, Marrim. I used to argue that way, but now that it’s all gone I can see clearly. It was my silence, the silence of people like me, that permitted it to continue. To carry on unchallenged. It was up to us, who saw, to do something. But we didn’t. For thousands of years we just accepted it.”
“But you didn’t create Terahnee, Eedrah.”
“No. That’s true. I merely used it, like everyone else.”
“I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”
He laughed bitterly. “Hard? I’m dying inside.”
Eedrah looked down. “Do you remember the maze, Marrim, at Horen Ro’Jadre’s house?”
“I remember beating you.”
“Has Atrus told you how that worked?”
“No. Some kind of clever machinery, I suppose.”
“You suppose!” He huffed out a breath. “Slaves did that, Marrim! Relyimah! Hundreds of them harnessed to great cogs and pulleys, straining to lift and turn those massive rooms. And if one fell, or slipped, he would be trampled by his fellows, because there was not time to stop. The rooms had to be turned. Twelve seconds they had, remember? Twelve seconds!”
Marrim was staring at him in shock.
“How does that make you feel, Marrim, knowing that your sport probably killed several young men?”
She stared, horrified.
“Yes, well, imagine feeling that each and every day of your life! Or worse. Imagine numbing yourself so that you could no longer feel!”
§
In the days that followed, they began to understand the scale of the problems facing them. Before the sickness Terahnee had been a land of two hundred million souls, not including the P’aarli and the silent relyimah—uncounted, naturally. Now the native population had plummeted to less than a hundred thousand—ironically, those who, like Eedrah, had been sickliest among them. But now the slaves, that great unseen mass, had emerged into the sunlight, and even after their own losses, they numbered in excess of two billion souls.
It was a huge logistical problem, and one that not even Gat had properly understood. The old man busied himself, going from gathering to gathering, speaking to the local relyimah and talking of the “way ahead,” but the practical details he left to Atrus and Eedrah.
Their first task was to organize a team of “scribes”—relyimah who could write and had experience of various nonmenial tasks. Word went out among the local estates, and very quickly they began to come, in twos and threes and just occasionally alone, making their way to the great house at Ro’Jethhe.
Master Tamon was given the job of bringing the D’ni survivors through and settling them in Terahnee, where they might aid Atrus and the others in the task of building the new social order.
Catherine, meanwhile, dedicated herself to the task of bringing together all of the slaves, both male and female. It could not be done hurriedly, not unless they wished to court disaster, for they were conscious that, as in so many spheres, the relyimah did not know how to behave socially. It was not something they had been taught; indeed, they had been positively discouraged from thinking of themselves as human beings with human emotions and human needs. But now they must, and the transition was not going to be easy. And so, for the while, a form of segregation was maintained.
And there was one other, perhaps more pressing, problem. The Terahnee Ages. It was like D’ni again, only this time the problem was increased a thousandfold. How many Books were there? And who was in them?”
Atrus’s first instinct was to gather all the Books in, but was that really the answer? There were not enough of his own people to undertake the task, and he was not certain he could trust the relyimah to do it for him. Indeed, he wasn’t even certain that they knew the difference between an ordinary book and one that linked with another Age. Besides, he had seen with his own eyes how large the Terahnee libraries were, and the thought of trying to bring back and then store what might possibly be several million Books was a daunting one. And that was not to speak of searching them. Busy himself, he asked his young helpers, Carrad and Irras, to come up with a scheme.
Yet even as the problems mounted, there were successes. Atrus’s plan to send the relyimah back to their individual tasks worked well. Most seemed happy to have something to do again and the need for supervision proved less pressing than might have been thought. But all knew that the situation could not be maintained forever. Changes would have to be made, and soon.
But Atrus’s priority in those first few days was to give the relyimah laws and, with Oma’s and Esel’s help, he worked late into the night, reading and making notes from the six great volumes they had brought back from D’ni, ignoring what was specific to D’ni while attempting to frame a code of behavior, based on the core code of D’ni, that might serve the relyimah in the difficult times to come.
One problem Atrus was glad not to have to deal with was the aftermath of the sickness—the burning of the dead. That the relyimah took charge of, and for days the sky was filled, on every side, with great plumes of dark smoke. Under that pall, it might have been easy to despair, but there was hope, too. Hope that this greater freedom might prove permanent. Yet they must work hard if that was to be so.
On the fourth day after the gathering at Gehallah, Atrus called on Hersha and presented him with a Code of Law—a list of forty basic rights and responsibilities that could be understood by all and acted on at once. More detailed law would follow, Atrus said, but this was the essence of it. This was how the relyimah would henceforth govern themselves.
That very morning Oma and Esel began to organize the teams of relyimah scribes, setting up benches in the great library of Ro’Jethhe. By evening the first batch of a thousand copies were ready for distribution among the people. It was an enormous achievement and there was a general sense of euphoria.
Then word came that the body of the king had been found, and an hour later, even as night fell, Gat arrived to see Atrus, the torches of his guards lighting the way before him as he came up the ramp.
They embraced.
As Gat stood back his blank eyes flickered in the gusting flames of the lamps as if alive with vision.
“I want you to come with me, Atrus, to the capital. To bury the last king of Terahnee.”
“I will come.”
“Then let us go at once.”
Atrus turned, embracing Catherine briefly, then followed Gat back down the ramp toward the waiting boat.
§
As the first light of morning tinted the horizon, Atrus woke. Gat sat beside him in the boat, silent and, so it seemed, watchful.
Behind them the rowers—twelve young relyimah; volunteers, honored to serve the legendary Gat—kept their steady rhythm, drawing the long craft through the water. The sound was reassuring.
“You needed that,” Gat said, sensing that Atrus was awake. “Hersha says that you push yourself to the limit.”
“Hersha exaggerates. I like to work.”
“Yes, and we are grateful for it.” Gat turned his head and smiled. “But you must rest now. Besides, we need to talk, Atrus, and what better opportunity than this.”
Atrus sat up. “Are you uneasy, Gat?”
“A little. Oh, we are making real progress, but our greatest problems lie ahead of us, I fear. Your laws will help, yet it seems to me that simple habit is our greatest enemy.”
“Habit?”
“The habit of obedience and silence. The habit of not-being.” Gat turned his inert gaze fully on Atrus. “My people are like newborns. They do not know how to behave. But newborns are small and helpless and can be chastised by their parents. So it was among the Terahnee. But my newborns are large and muscular and—right now, at least—confused by the emotions they are feeling. Emotions they have always before held back, for fear of punishment or worse. Put simply, Atrus, they must learn how to live, and in doing so they will need all the guidance we can give them.”
“
I agree. And the D’ni and their friends will help.”
Gat smiled again. “I know. Your friendship is most valued, Atrus. But think. Think just how many of us there are. Two thousand million. How do we set about teaching so many? How can we possibly keep such a host in check?”
“It worries you, Gat?”
“To be sure it worries me. Time is against us, Atrus. Right now they are obedient, with the learned obedience of their kind. But the more we give them of themselves, the more they will want, and the worse, perhaps, they’ll be.”
“Do you think so?”
“Were not the Terahnee men? Oh, they may have acted like uncaring monsters, but given other circumstances they, like Eedrah, could have been different. Kinder, certainly. And so with a host of newborns. My relyimah. When they learn to be seen, then their problems will really begin, for some will like what they see and some will not. Some, like Ymur, will be angry at the waste of their former lives, while others, thinking back on it, will sink into a despair so deep they will never emerge from it.”
Atrus sighed. “I had not thought…”
The old man reached out and held his shoulder. “You have been busy, Atrus. Nor can you think of everything.”
“Then what are we to do?”
“Reduce the numbers, maybe. You spoke to Hersha of the Books—the Ages the Terahnee wrote. Perhaps we might use some of them, for resettling our people.”
“It’s possible.”
“Then we should investigate that possibility. It has been in my mind that maybe we should send the women there.”
Atrus turned to him, surprised.
“Oh, I have been thinking long and hard about it, Atrus. Wondering if there might not be a peaceful way of dealing with the matter. Of bringing together those who have so long been apart.”
“And?”
Gat let out a long, slow breath. “I believe it would not work. Catherine, I know, is looking at this problem, and I will wait to hear what she has to say before we act, but my feeling is that there is no solution to this most singular problem. Not for this generation, anyway. To introduce them to each other now might be to tear the fabric of our new society apart before it has had a chance to grow and prosper.”
“But a society of men…”
“And families, and children.”
Atrus frowned and looked down. “I do not like it, Gat. It would be too much like keeping things as they were. It would be…well, like denying the relyimah any kind of real normality.”
“You think they can be normal, Atrus, after all they have suffered?”
“I believe that they should be given the chance to try, even if it ends in failure. Life isn’t life without that risk.”
Gat looked away a moment, then he nodded. “Sometimes I feel you are much wiser than you appear, Atrus.”
Atrus laughed. “And how do I appear to you, my friend?”
“Like the voice of blind certainty itself.”
§
As the sun rose higher and the landscape about them was revealed, they saw just how much damage the relyimah had wreaked upon it. Statues were smashed and many visual conceits destroyed entirely. This surprised Atrus, who had heard nothing of such activities. At the same time, he noted how most living things—the trees and flowers—were untouched, and this, as much as any other thing he’d seen, gave him hope.
Yet now that he knew what he was seeing, this landscape, which had seemed so wonderful when first he’d viewed it, so constantly surprising, now seemed merely desolate: a fragile artifice that had been shattered in an instant.
Like the Ages my father wrote…
“We should remove all this,” he said, speaking to Gat for the first time in hours.
“Their playthings, you mean?”
“Yes, and their houses, too. All signs of what they were.”
Gat smiled. “It would take forever.”
“Yet we could make a start.”
“Maybe.” The old man sat forward, gesturing toward the city, which now lay directly ahead of them. It had grown constantly these past few hours, dominating the skyline, more like a mountain than anything mere men had made. “But what of that? How would you begin to take that down?”
Atrus smiled. Sometimes it was almost as if the old man actually saw what he was looking at.
“Little by little.”
Gat’s laughter was gentle. “I can think of better things to do, can’t you?”
“You cannot live in the ruins of the past.”
“And yet you tried, Atrus.”
“Then maybe I was wrong.” And for the first time he saw clearly that he had been wrong to try to build his new D’ni in the ruins of the old.
“And maybe we have no option by to try,” Gat said, a defensiveness in his voice; then, softening, “Yet your idea has merit, Atrus. We should destroy their toys, at the very least. All of their hideous distractions. But the houses…we could use them, perhaps. Partition the rooms. Use them to treat the sick, or as centers of local government.”
Atrus nodded distractedly, yet he found himself appalled by the idea, if only because of those tunnels in the walls. Each Terahnee house that stood was a monument to the Great Lie in which they had all once lived; a reminder of the relyimah’s imperative not to be seen.
Yet not everything could be achieved at once. Some things would have to wait, and maybe this was one of them. He looked to Gat once more and saw how troubled the old man was. It was an unexpected insight.
“Everything will be for the best,” he said reassuringly. Yet even as he spoke, he recalled what Gat had said of his “blind certainty.” And, sure enough, the old man’s face changed, a smile coming to those strong yet ancient features.
“Yes, Atrus. I am sure it will be so.”
§
That afternoon it rained; the first rain Atrus had known since coming into Terahnee.
Gat had wanted to pull the canopy across, not for himself, but to protect Atrus from the downpour, but Atrus had refused and had stood there instead, enjoying the feel of the rain beating down on him. It felt refreshing after the heat of the last few days, cleansing.
The storm passed and he sat again, the rhythm of the oars dipping and rising from the water lulling him, his clothes, which were stuck to him, slowly drying in the sunlight.
He woke to find Gat tapping his arm. “Come, Atrus, we must walk a while.”
Atrus looked about him, then stretched and got up, climbing from the boat. Ahead of them the canal disappeared into the side of a great hill of marble. From his previous journey Atrus recognized it as the beginning of the great system of locks that ended in Ro’Jadre’s house.
None of those locks worked now, for Gat had forbidden any of his people to place themselves in harness and lift the great weights that moved the water from one level to the next. And so they made their way on foot, climbing the long flights of steps that led up the side of the hill, and out onto a great ledge of stone overlooking Ro’Jadre.
Beyond the house another boat awaited them, fresh rowers already in place. And beyond that the city.
Standing there, Atrus found himself overwhelmed suddenly by a strange ambivalence. The house, the view itself, was truly magnificent. No understanding of the evil that lay behind it could take that from it. Yet how could such beauty, such a sure instinct for what was beautiful, coexist with such inhumanity?
He followed Gat across, surprised as ever that the old man knew his way without his eyes. And as he climbed into the boat behind Gat, he found his earlier doubts washed from him.
It would work. They would make it work.
And as Ro’Jadre receded beyond the surrounding hills, Atrus found himself looking outward again, embracing the whole of that vast world in which he found himself involved, his mind beginning to formulate new plans for the relyimah, new schemes for them to carry out.
§
The capital was silent, eerily empty. As they made their way up the great channel, at its heart, the young rower
s pulling slowly, staring about them as they went, Atrus came to understand just how completely Terahnee was undone.
Here nothing had survived. At the first appearance of the sickness, the relyimah had fled, leaving their masters to their fate. Weeds grew between the slabs of stone, encouraged by the recent rain.
Already it looked unkempt, abandoned, the evidence of many fires—accidental or deliberately set, it was hard to say—blackening its once-pristine whiteness.
Baddu and several of the other relyimah leaders met them at the foot of the great pile that was the royal palace, greeting them warmly in that place without warmth.
“Are they all dead?” Atrus asked, for it was like being in a giant mausoleum.
“Those that are not mad or long fled,” Baddu answered him with a hint of dry humor. “We saw one earlier, wandering the streets and mumbling to himself.”
“And he saw you?”
“Mad or otherwise, he was Terahnee.”
Atrus nodded, yet he was pained by the thought that even after all they had suffered, the Terahnee still could not see. “So,” he said finally, “where is Ro’Eh Ro’Dan?”
“Come,” Baddu said, turning toward an arch on the far side of that marbled jetty. “It is some climb, but worth it just to see.”
§
Baddu had not been joking. A thousand steps or more they climbed, and still the stairway twisted through the rock. Up and up they went, until, suddenly, they came out into a dimly lit chamber, the size of which was difficult to gauge, for it seemed like a great cavern in the rock.
For a moment Atrus thought he was back in D’ni, so reminiscent was it. But then he recognized where he was. This was the king’s audience chamber, where thousands upon thousands of Terahnee notables had sat to witness his arrival. And there, somewhere in the darkness on the far side of the great chamber, was the king’s emerald throne.
The Myst Reader Page 85
