The Myst Reader (23 page)

Relieved, Atrus shook himself, then stepped aside, conscious that his father was linking after him.

He waited, expecting Gehn to appear at any moment, for the air to take on that strangely fluid quality it had when someone was linking through—a quality that, looking at it, was like a flaw, an
occlusion
, in the eye itself.

Strange. Atrus frowned and made to step toward the space he’d just left, even as the air changed and, like a bubble squeezed out of the nothingness, his father appeared.

Gehn looked about him, eyeing the walls critically. “Good,” he said quietly, taking in a deep breath. “The air smells very fresh.”

Atrus watched his father, conscious that he was being judged, that this was a test of sorts.

“You have the Linking Book on you, I assume?”

Slowly, Atrus’s mouth fell open. The Linking Book! In his excitement he had completely forgotten about the Linking Book! He was so used to traveling in Ages where the Linking Books were already in place, that he had overlooked it!

He groaned, the blood draining from his face.

Gehn held out a Linking Book before his eyes. “You forgot. But fortunately
I
did not.”

Atrus closed his eyes, the thought that he might have trapped them there forever making him tremble.

“I’m sorry…” he began, but Gehn cut him short with a terse little gesture of his hand. His father’s eyes were livid with rage.

“Do
not
tell me how sorry you are, Atrus. Sorry is utterly inadequate. Sorry is for fools and idiots who cannot think straight. I considered you better than that, but your gross carelessness in this instance is a sign of your immaturity. There was but one single, crucial thing you had to remember, and you forgot!” Gehn huffed out a great sigh of exasperation, then smacked the book against the top of Atrus’s head, his voice rising with controlled anger. “What if I had not thought to bring your Linking Book? What then? Where would we be?”

Herei, Atrus thought. Forever here.

Gehn thrust the book into his hands, then turned away, making for the entrance.

Atrus stood uncertainly, then followed his father across.

“Well,” Gehn said, slowing down to let Atrus catch up, but refusing to look at him. “I suppose you had better show me what you have written.”

He led his father out, through a narrow stone passage that was very different from how he’d imagined it—how he
thought
he’d written it—and into a cavelike depression that was open to the sky, bright sunlight pouring down into it from the clear blue heavens. There was a pool to one side, surrounded by lush vegetation and a few light-colored rocks, while on the far side a flight of tiered rocks climbed the rock face.

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.