The Myst Reader (29 page)

Koena turned, looking to Gehn. “Master, you have to save us! Please, Master, I beg you!”

But Gehn, who had seen what Koena had seen, simply turned away. Throwing off his crown, he unfastened his cloak at the neck and let it fall, then, going over to the tent, ducked inside, emerging a moment later with his knapsack, into which he quickly stowed his pipe.

“Come,” he said, gesturing to Atrus. “The ceremony’s over.”

Atrus stared a moment, then, casting aside the pendant, ran after Gehn, catching up with him and grasping his arm, turned him so that he faced him, shouting into his face over the sound of the storm.

“We must get back and change things! Now, before it’s too late!”

“Too late? It is already too late! Look at it! I said it was unstable!”

“No!” Atrus yelled, desperate now. “You can change it. You can erase the changes you made and put things right. You
can
. You told me you can! After all, you are a god, aren’t you?”

That last seemed to hit home. Gehn gave the briefest nod, then, pushing past his son, hurried across the bridge, making his way back up the rain-churned slope toward the cave, leaving Atrus to run after him.

F
OR AN HOUR NOW GEHN HAD SAT AT HIS
desk in silence, deaf to Atrus’s pleas, staring into the air blankly as he sucked on his pipe.

“You have to do something,” Atrus said, taking up the cause again. “You
have
to! They’re dying back there!”

Nothing. Not even the flicker of an eyebrow.

Atrus grimaced, trying not to imagine their suffering back there on the Thirty-seventh Age, trying not to think of the old woman and the girl, but it was impossible.

He stared at Gehn. It was the first time he had seen this side of his father; this
indecisiveness
. This hideous indifference.

“Won’t you help them, father? Won’t you?”

Nothing.

Something snapped in him. Stepping up to the desk, Atrus leaned across, meaning to take the book.

“If you won’t, then let me …”

Gehn’s hand gripped his like a vice. He looked up into Atrus’s face, his eyes hard.
“You?”

It was the first thing Gehn had said for ages.

Atrus pulled his hand free. “They’re dying,” he said for what seemed like the thousandth time. “We
have
to help them. We could make changes.”

Gehn laughed bleakly. “Changes?”

“To fix things.”

Gehn’s eyes held his a moment, then looked away.

In his mind Atrus saw it again, the water pouring from the edge of the great rock table as it rose and rose on a cushion of red hot lava.

“So that’s it, is it?” he said, glaring at his father. “You
can’t
fix it?”

Gehn straightened up, looking at Atrus, something of the old arrogance in his eyes. “Did I
say
that?”

For a moment longer Gehn glared back at his son, then, opening the Book of the Thirty-seventh Age, he reached across and, dipping the pen into the ink pot, proceeded to cross out the last few entries in the book, using the D’ni negating symbol.

“There,” he said, handing the book to Atrus. “I have fixed it.”

Atrus stared at it, stunned.

Gehn nodded at the book. “Well? You want to check for yourself?”

He had been almost too afraid to ask. “Can I?”

“That
is
what you wanted, no?”

Atrus nodded.

“Then go. But try not to be too long. I have wasted enough time already on those ingrates!”

THE AIR IN THE CAVE WAS MUSTY, BUT NO
more so than on the other occasions he had gone there. It was—and this was the important point—free of the hideous stench of sulfur. The very normality of it raised his spirits.

There
, he heard his father say, handing him the book,
I’ve fixed it
.

Well, now he’d know.

Atrus climbed up out of the cave, then stood on the boulder, overlooking the slope, breathing in the clear, sweet air.

It was true! Gehn had fixed it! There was water in the lake and rich grass on the slopes. He could hear birdsong and the sound of the wind rustling through the nearby trees. Down below the village seemed peaceful, the islanders going about their lives quite normally.

He laughed, then jumped down, hurrying now, keen to ask Salar just what exactly had happened in his absence, what changes she had witnessed—but coming around the hump, he stopped dead, perturbed by the sight that met his eyes.

He ran to the ridge, then stood there, breathing shallowly as he looked out across the harbor. The boats were there, moored in a tight semicircle, just as before, and there was the bridge … but beyond?

He gasped, his theory confirmed in a moment. The meeting hut was gone, and the tent. In their place was a cluster of huts, like those on this side of the bridge.

Hearing a noise behind him he turned, facing Koena, surprised to see that the man was in ordinary village clothes.

“Koena?”

The man tensed at the word, the thick wooden club he held gripped tightly. There was fear in his face.

“What is it?” Atrus asked, surprised.

“Usshua umma immuni?”
Koena asked, his hostility unmistakable now.

Atrus blinked. What was that language? Then, realizing he was in danger, he put his hands up, signaling that he meant no harm. “It’s me, Koena. Atrus. Don’t you recognize me?”

“Usshua illila umawa?”
the frightened native demanded, waving his club.

Atrus shook his head, as if to clear it. What was wrong here? Why was everything so different? Out of instinct he turned back toward the cave, then stopped, realizing that there would be no Linking Book there. He felt in his pocket anxiously, then relaxed. His copy Linking Book was there.

Koena was still watching him, his eyes narrowed. But, of course, he wasn’t Koena, or not the Koena he knew anyway, for his father had never been here to make him his acolyte.
No
, Atrus thought,
and nor have I
. For this was not the Thirty-seventh Age—or, at least, not that same Age his father had “created” and he, Atrus, had lived in; this was another world entirely, like it—so like it as to be frighteningly familiar—and yet somewhere else.

His head swam, as if the solid ground had fallen away from him.
I am in another universe entirely, in another Age; one that my father tampered into existence
.

No, he told himself, thinking it through;
that’s wrong. My father didn’t create this—this was here all along, merely waiting for us to link to it
.

An Age where he knew everyone and was not known. He nodded to himself, understanding what had happened. His father’s erasures in the Book had taken them back down the central trunk of the great tree of possibility and along another branch entirely.

Atrus took one last long look at the Age, then, knowing he was not wanted, turned and fled toward the cave, where, after he was gone, his Linking Book would never be found.

IN ATRUS’S ABSENCE GEHN HAD LIT THE FIRE
and had sunk into the chair beside it. That was where Atrus found him, slumped back, his pipe discarded on the floor beside him, his mouth open in a stupor.

Gehn was not sleeping, or if he was, it was a fitful kind of sleep, for his eyelids fluttered and from time to time he would mutter then give a tiny groan.

Looking at him, Atrus felt angry and betrayed. Gehn had said that he was going to fix it, but he hadn’t. That other world, the
real
Thirty-seventh Age, had been destroyed, or, at least, his link to it. And that was all Gehn’s fault, because he hadn’t understood what he was doing. Atrus stood over his father, feeling a profound contempt for him.

“Wake up!” he shouted, leaning over Gehn and giving him a shake. “I need to talk to you!”

For a moment he thought he hadn’t managed to wake Gehn. Yet as he went to shake him again, Gehn reached up and pushed his hand aside.

“Leave me be!” he grumbled. “Go on … go to your room, boy, and leave me in peace!”

“No!” Atrus said defiantly. “I won’t! Not until this is settled.”

Gehn’s left eye pried open. A kind of snarling smile appeared at one corner of his mouth.
“Settled?”

“We need to talk,” Atrus said, keeping firm to his purpose, determined not to let his father browbeat or belittle him this time.

“Talk?”
Gehn’s slow laughter had an edge of mockery to it now. “What could we possibly have to talk about, you and I?”

“I want to talk about the Art. About what it is. What it
really
is.”

Gehn stared at him disdainfully, then, sitting up, reached beside his chair for his pipe.

“Go and get some sleep, boy, and stop talking such nonsense. What do
you
know about the Art?”

“Enough to know that you’re wrong, father. That your Ages are unstable because you don’t understand what you’ve been doing all this while!”

Atrus had only guessed about most of Gehn’s worlds being unstable, but it seemed he’d hit the bull’s-eye with that comment, for Gehn sat forward, his pallid face suddenly ash white.

“You’re wrong!” Gehn hissed. “You’re just a boy. What do
you
know?”

“I know that you don’t understand the Whole!”

Gehn roared with amusement. “And you think
you
have all the answers, eh, boy?”

Atrus leaned over the table, determined to outface his father. “Some of them. But they’re not ones
you
want to hear. You’d rather carry on as you are, stumbling blindly through the Ages, copying this phrase out of that book and that one out of another, as if you could somehow chance upon it that way.”

Gehn’s hands had slowly tightened their grip on the arms of the chair; now, pulling himself up out of the chair, his anger exploded. As Atrus reeled back, Gehn shouted into his face, spitting with fury.

“How
dare
you think to criticize me! Me, who taught you all you know! Who brought you here out of that godforsaken crack and educated you! How dare you even
begin
to think you have the answers!”

He poked Atrus hard in the chest. “How long have you been doing this now, eh, boy? Three years? Three and a half? And how long have I been studying the Art? Thirty years now! Thirty years! Since I was four.”

Gehn made a small noise of disgust. “You think because you managed to make one measly Age that you know it all, but you don’t, boy! You do not even know the start of it. Here …”

Gehn turned and went over to the desk. To Atrus’s dismay he picked up Atrus’s book and leafed it open. For a moment or two he read in silence.

“This phrase here … look how unnecessarily ornate it is … that’s how a novice writes, boy. It lacks strength. It lacks economy of expression.” And, reaching across, he took the pen and dipped it in the ink pot.

Atrus watched, horrified, knowing what was to come, yet still unable to believe that his father would actually dare to tamper with
his
Age.

But Gehn seemed oblivious of him now. Sitting at his desk, he drew the book toward him, then began to delete symbols here and there, using the D’ni negative, simplifying the phrases Atrus had spent so long perfecting—phrases which Atrus knew, from long reading in the ancient D’ni texts, were the perfect way of describing the things he wanted in his world.

“Please …” Atrus pleaded. “There is a reason for all those words. They
have
to be there!”

“In what book did you find this?” Gehn asked, tapping another of his phrases. “This nonsense about the blue flowers?”

“It wasn’t in a book …”

“Ridiculous!” Gehn said, barely masking his contempt. “Frivolous nonsense, that’s all it is! This is overwritten, that’s all! There is far too much unnecessary detail!”

And, without another word, Gehn proceeded to score out the section about the flowers.

“No!”
Atrus cried out, taking a step toward the desk.

Gehn glared at him, his voice stern. “Be quiet, boy, and let me concentrate!”