The Myst Reader (136 page)

“Until a better system is devised. Until
real
changes can be made. But you are right … these basic tasks must be continued, for without them nothing will work.”

“Then so it will be,” Gat said, a beaming smile lighting his blind face. “But what of the women?”

“Women?” There was a look of consternation on Atrus’s face. “There are
female
relyimah?”

“Of course. Who do you think did most of the work in the great houses?”

“The men, I thought …”

He looked to Hersha, who shrugged. “I thought you knew, Atrus. They have their own quarters, far from the men’s quarters.”

“Segregated, you mean?”

But the word meant nothing to Hersha.

Atrus looked about him, seeing things anew. “And the two never meet?”

“Never,” Gat answered.

“And now?”

Gat looked away, embarrassed. “It is … difficult. More difficult than seeing and being seen. To even look at one was an offense for which a male relyimah might die.”

Atrus grimaced. “I didn’t …”

“See?”
Eedrah said, breaking his long silence. “Oh, it was the worst of it, Atrus. Beside that, all other cruelties were bearable. But to break
that
bond.” He shuddered. “For that alone I agree with Ymur. If I were relyimah I would hunt my people down until the last of us was dead.”

“Yourself included, Eedrah?”

Gat was staring blindly at Eedrah, astonished by the depth of bitterness he had displayed.

“I was but barely better than my fellows. I did nothing to persuade them they were wrong.”

“You helped us, Eedrah,” Hersha said, reaching out and actually touching the Terahnee.

Eedrah stared a moment at the place where Hersha’s hand rested on his arm, then looked about him. Not a face condemned him. He closed his eyes, the pain he was feeling at that moment overwhelming him. “To live such a lie … some days it was unbearable.”

“I understand,” Gat said. “But now that all is done with, and you, my brother, you must help us find a better way.”

Eedrah looked at the blind man, then bowed his head. “As you wish … my brother.”

BACK AT THE GREAT HOUSE IN RO’JETHHE
, Atrus sat down with Catherine, quickly confiding to her all that had happened at the assembly.

“There are
female
relyimah?” she asked, astonished.

“So they tell me. But Hersha says they are kept separate. Segregated. Apparently they were not even allowed to look at each other. On pain of death. And they are neutered—male and female both—just in case any should escape and hide away.”

Catherine stared at him, horrified. “This changes everything.”

“How so?”

“It’s very simple. You wish to make a proper world of this, a real society, with good laws and fair treatment for all. But how can you create any kind of society when there are no children and no possibility of children?”

“Then we shall bring them in, from other Ages. Oh, not as the Terahnee brought them in, as slaves, but with their families.”

“Do you think that will work?”

“I do not know. Yet we must try.” Atrus sat back, kneading his neck with one hand, tired now after the long day. “One thing I do know: This is an undertaking far larger than the rebuilding of D’ni ever was. But if the will is here—and I think it is—then we can make it work. And maybe we might settle here, after all. Be part of this.”

She smiled. “Maybe. But first you ought to send a messenger to Master Tamon, to tell him all is well.”

“I shall. At once.”

He stood and turned to go, but Catherine called him back. “Atrus? One other thing. Have you noticed …”

“Noticed?”

“Marrim and Eedrah. Have you noticed how they spend time with each other?”

MARRIM POKED HER HEAD AROUND THE DOOR.

“So there you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

Eedrah sat at the desk on the far side of the library, a journal open in front of him. At the sound of her voice he had set his pen down. Now, as Marrim walked across, he sanded the page and closed the journal.

“Something you don’t want me to see?” she teased, coming up to the desk.

He looked back at her sullenly, then pushed the journal across the desk to her. “Look, if you want.”

“No,” she said, realizing she had hurt his feelings. “Are you all right?”

He looked to one side of her, then shook his head. “No, not really. I feel …” He looked straight at her. “I feel like I oughtn’t to have lived.”

“It’s what half the D’ni suffer from,” she said brightly. “So Catherine says.” Then, she spoke more seriously. “You don’t really feel like that, do you? I mean, I thought you wanted to help the relyimah.”

“I do.” Eedrah frowned, then stood up, walking halfway across that massive floor before he turned to look back at her. “Things were said tonight, at the assembly. There was this one relyimah called Ymur. A disagreeable type, yet what he said brought it home to me. How evil it all was. And I felt that I’d permitted it somehow.”

“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 no 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.