The Myst Reader (10 page)

Just below him the red hot surface seemed to slowly undulate, like some living thing, a great bubble of superheated air emerging every now and then to break the surface with a giant “glop,” the air filled suddenly with steam and he stinging scent of sulfur.

Atrus was coughing now. His feet seemed to be burning and his chest felt fit to burst. If he did not cross the beam soon he would collapse.

“Come on!” Gehn urged him from the other side. “Don’t stop, boy! Get going again. You’re almost there!”

His head was swimming now and he felt that any moment he would fall. And if he fell…

He took three paces out onto the beam, feeling its intense heat through the thick leather of his boots.

“Come on!” his father urged, but he could not move. It was as if he, too, had been turned to stone.

“Come on!”

The beam lurched under him and for a moment he thought he was going to fall, but some instinct took hold of him. As the narrow beam tilted, he jumped, his feet thudding against the stone on the other side.

His vision blurred. He couldn’t breathe. Staggering, he took a step backward…

6

~~~~~~~~~~

 

Atrus woke in a cool, brightly-lit cavern, the air of which was fresh and sweet after the air in the lava cavern. There was a blanket over him and from close by he could hear the echoing drip drip drip of water. Shivering, he sat up, wondering where he was, and immediately saw his father, less than thirty feet away, standing beside a pool, the surface of which seemed to glow as if illuminated from below.

His feet and legs ached and his head still felt strangely heavy, but otherwise he felt all right. Piecing things together, he began to understand. He had almost fallen from the bridge. His father must have rescued him.

Thinking of it, he looked down, smiling. It was the kind of thing Anna would have done. The same thing he himself would have done had their positions been reversed.

Atrus looked across again, trying to get the measure of this man—this stranger—who had come into his life so suddenly and changed it. He was strange, there was no doubting it, and his manner was abrupt almost to the point of rudeness, but maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe he was simply not used to dealing with people: as unused to the idea if a “son” as he, Atrus, was unused to the idea of a “father.” If so, he should make allowances. Until they knew each other better. Until that tie of blood was also one of friendship.

This line of reasoning cheered him. Throwing off the blanket he got up and hobbled over to where his father stood, standing beside him silently, looking out across the strangely lit pool.

“What does that?” he asked, pointing to the water’s surface.

Gehn turned. He had clearly been preoccupied with some matter. “Ah, Atrus…you’re up.”

“I…I guess I have to thank you.”

Gehn shrugged, then looked back across the pond. “It’s good to talk again,” he said, pushing out his chin in a strange gesture. “It’s been very isolated down here on my own. I’ve longed for a companion for a long time now. An intellectual companion, that is. When I knew you were alive…well,” he turned. “To be honest with you, Atrus, I was surprised. I did not expect you to survive. But I was pleased. I thought we might get on. Eventually.”

Atrus smiled shyly. “I hope so. I want to learn.”

“Good. That is a healthy attitude to have.” Then, “Are you up to traveling on? I have been pushing you, I realize, but there is good reason.”

“I’ll be ok,” Atrus said, feeling a sudden warmth toward his father. “It’s just so…strange.”

Gehn stared at him thoughtfully. “Yes. I suppose it must be, after the cleft. But the best of it lies ahead, Atrus. And I mean the best. D’ni. Tonight we shall reach D’ni.”

Atrus’s face lit. “Tonight?” Then an expression of confusion crossed his features. “But what time is it now? Morning, afternoon? I can’t follow it any longer. Down here time seems to have no meaning.”

Gehn took out his D’ni timer and handed it to Atrus.

“See there” he said, indicating the five differently shaded sectors—three light, two dark—that were marked on the circular face. A thin trail of silver spiraled from the center of the circle, stopping just inside the second of the lightly shaded sectors. “Right now it is the D’ni midday. We D’ni measure time differently from those who dwell on the surface. They set their clocks to the passage of the sun. We’ however, set our clocks to the biological rhythms of our environment. Each of those sectors represents just over six hours in surface time.”

“So the D’ni day is longer?”

“Very good, Atrus. You learn quickly.”

Gehn took the timer back and, shaking it, held it to his ear, almost as if to check it was still working. Then, satisfied, he slipped it back into his pocket and looked to Atrus.

“If you’re ready?”

 

§

 

Despite Atrus’s expectations, the way grew harder. Fallen rock blocked the way in several places and they had to climb over piles of jagged stone or squeeze through narrow gaps. The tunnels, too, seemed to grow smaller and darker, and though he could not be sure of it, Atrus sensed that they had long strayed from the straight path that led direct to D’ni. Certainly there was no sign of that wonderful stone-and-metal path beneath their feet. Despite everything, however, his spirits were high, his whole being filled with an excited anticipation that coursed like a drug in his veins.

D’ni! He would soon be in D’ni! Why, even the dull pain in his feet seemed insignificant beside that fact.

They had traveled only an hour or so when Gehn called back to him and told him to get over to the right. Just ahead, part of the tunnel floor had fallen away to form a kind of pit. As he edged around it he could see, far below, a valley, with what looked like a broad, dark river flowing through it. He strained his ears, thinking he could faintly hear the sound of it—a roaring, rushing noise—but could not be sure.

Farther on, that noise, which he had begun to think was merely in his head, began to grow, until, coming out of the tunnel into a massive opening, the far walls of which could not be glimpsed in the darkness, that same sound filled the air, seeming to shake the walls on every side. The air was damp and cold, tiny particles of glittering mist dancing in the light from their lanterns.

Atrus backed against the wall. Then, as Gehn switched on the big lamp, he saw what it was.

Water fell in a solid sheet from a ledge two hundred feet above them, plunging a thousand feet into a massive pool below. In the torch’s beam the water was like solid crystal.

Atrus turned, in time to glimpse Gehn returning the notebook to his inner pocket. He gestured past Atrus, indicating the way with his torch, the beam illuminating a broad ledge that circled the massive cavern.

Coming into the smaller cavern at the back of the falls, Gehn stopped and called him over, holding his lantern out over a shelf of rock that was filled with crystal-clear water.

Atrus leaned close to look, then gave a little gasp of surprise. In the water were a number of long, colorless fish that looked like worms. They had frilled transparent gills and fins. As he looked, they scurried across and, slipping through a tiny rent in the lip of the rock, seemed to jump into the pool below with a plip-plop-plip that echoed throughout that tiny space.

“What are they?” Atrus asked, looking up into his father’s eyes.

“Salamanders,” Gehn answered. “They live down here, along with crickets, spiders, millipedes, and fish. They’re troglodytic, Atrus. They never leave these caves. And they’re blind, too. Did you notice that?”

Gehn turned away and walked on, his boots crunching across the littered floor of the cavern.

For a long time they had been descending; now they began to climb, the way getting easier, until the tunnel they were following suddenly swung round to the right and met a second, larger tunnel.

Stepping out into it, Atrus gave a little gasp of surprise. It was the D’ni path! Both ahead and behind it stretched away, straight and perfectly cylindrical, into the darkness of the rock.

Staring back at the way they’d come, he understood what they must have done. For some reason—a cave-in, possibly—the straight path had been blocked, and they had taken an alternate route.

For a moment he recollected his father studying the diagram in his notebook and the faint anxiety that had been in his eyes, and wondered how he had come upon those paths; whether it had been a question of stumbling aimlessly in the darkness, constantly tracing and retracing his path until he’d found a way through.

“Atrus?”

He turned. Gehn was already fifty feet up the tunnel.

“I’m coming?” he called, hobbling to catch up. But in his mind he was imagining his father, all those years ago, when he had first returned to D’ni, struggling in the darkness here beneath the earth—alone, completely and utterly alone—and felt a deep admiration of the courage that had driven him.

 

§

 

“Are we close?”

“Not far,” Gehn answered. “The Gate is just ahead.”

The news thrilled Atrus. Not far! There had been times when he’d thought they would walk forever and never arrive; but now they were almost there. The land he’d dreamed about all his life lay just ahead. A land of wonder and mystery.

Atrus hurried on, catching up with his father, keeping abreast with him as they neared the tunnel’s end. He could see it now, directly ahead, and beyond it, on the far side of a massive marble plaza…

“Is
that
the Gate?” he asked, awed, his voice a whisper.

“That’s it,” Gehn said, grinning proudly. “It marks the southern boundary of the D’ni kingdom. Beyond it, everything for a hundred miles belongs to the D’ni.”

Atrus looked to his father, surprised that he talked of the D’ni as if they still existed, then he looked back, taking in the sheer size of the great stone gate that was revealed beyond the tunnel’s exit.

As they came out, he looked up and up and up, his mouth open in wonder. Though the surface was cracked in places and fragments had fallen away, littering the great expanse of marbled floor that lay before him, it was still magnificent. Filling the whole of one end of what was clearly a vast cavern, the huge stone barrier plugged that space from wall to wall, its surface filled with what seemed like an infinity of intertwining shapes—of men, machines, and beasts; of flowers and shields and faces; and D’ni words, some of which he recognized—all of it cut from a jet black granite that seemed to sparkle in the light from Gehn’s lantern.

The Gate dwarfed them, like nothing they had so far seen. As he walked toward it Atrus felt the hairs on his neck rise. Whatever he had pictured in his head, whatever he’d imagined while listening to Anna’s tales, the reality exceeded it by far.

Stepping beneath that arch, he looked up; its massive thickness impressing him. How had the D’ni fashioned such a vast artifact? How had they cut the blocks, how fashioned them? From his own limited experience, he knew the difficulties of working stone, but the D’ni had thought nothing of throwing up such a huge mass of it.

Ahead of him the marble floor ended abruptly. Beyond it a cavern stretched away, its walls pocked with tunnel entrances. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

It was suddenly very warm, the air much closer than it had been. Gehn glanced at his notebook again, then began to make his way across the floor of the cavern.

Selecting one of the larger tunnels, he gestured to Atrus to catch up with him, then turned and disappeared inside. The tunnel was much larger than any they had been in, with countless tunnels and small caverns—clearly artificially excavated—branching off.

Atrus followed his father, his eyes constantly surveying what lay to either side, noticing new things every second: great wheels and gantries; factories and warehouses; great mounds of loose rock and equally huge pits over which massive abandoned cranes stood like sentinels—all these and many other things, most of which he could not recognize at first sight.

Great machines stood idle everywhere he looked, as though abandoned only hours before, their oil-like, lacquered surface gleaming darkly in their passing light. Huge mining rigs rested on great pneumatic platforms beside the gaping holes of shafts bored into the foot of the cavern’s walls, like massive insects feeding, their squat dark shapes still and silent.

Steam rose unchanneled from great fissures on every side: steam that had once powered the industrial might of D’ni. Elsewhere simple stone houses stood empty, roofless in the D’ni style, the thin cloth screens that had once maintained their privacy shredded by the same force that had toppled the stone towers of the factories.

Seeing it all, Atrus wondered just how it could have come to an end. It was so vast, so extraordinary.

From time to time other paths crossed their own, making him realize that there was not one D’ni path but an endless labyrinth of them, threading their way through the dark earth.

Suddenly, without warning, Gehn began to climb the wall of the tunnel, ducking into a much smaller shaft. Atrus, catching up, looked across to his right and saw that the tunnel was blocked some twenty yards ahead, collapsed in upon itself. Fearful of losing Gehn, he climbed the tunnel wall, following him inside.

 

§

 

They had been walking for hours and all the way their path had got slowly narrower, hotter, stuffier. Gehn now walked with the notebook open in one hand, consulting it almost constantly. The path had taken so many twists and turns that Atrus felt numbed by it, but still Gehn went on, confident, it seemed, that it led somewhere.

Then, suddenly, the quality of the light changed. Atrus blinked, his senses sparked to life by that sudden change. There was a faint breeze, a slight cooling of the air. As they turned the next corner there was a marked increase in the intensity of the light, a definite orange glow up ahead. The air was cool and clear, heavy suddenly with the scent of vegetation. The path climbed.