The Myst Reader (5 page)

As he watched, great billows of steam rose up out of the caldera, as if the dormant giant had returned to life.

“It’s all right,” Anna said, coming over and placing her hand on his shoulder. “It’s only where the rain has seeped down into the deep vents.”

Atrus burrowed into his grandmother’s side. Yet he was no longer afraid. Now that it had passed—now that he had
survived
it—he felt elated,
exhilarated
.

“Well?” she asked quietly. “What did you think?”

“Where did it come from?” he asked, watching, fascinated, as that massive dark wall receded slowly into the distance.

“From the great ocean,” she answered. “It travels hundreds of miles to get here.”

He nodded, but his mind was back watching that great silver-black curtain rush toward him once again and swallow him up, feeling it drum against his flesh like a thousand blunt needles.

Atrus glanced up at his grandmother and laughed. “Why, you’re steaming, grandmother!”

She grinned and poked him gently. “And so are you, Atrus. Come, let’s go inside, before the sun dries us out again.”

He nodded and began to climb the cleftwall, meaning to go and free Flame from the storeroom, yet as he popped his head over the rim he stopped dead, his mouth falling open in a tiny oh of surprise.

Below him the cleft was a giant blue-black mirror, the shadow of the steep walls dividing it in half, like a jagged shield.

Coming alongside him, Anna crouched and, smiling, looked into his face.

“Would you like to learn to swim, little sand worm?”

ANNA WOKE ATRUS IN THE DARK BEFORE
first light, shaking him gently then standing back, the lamp held high, its soft yellow glow filling the shelf where he lay.

“Come,” she said simply, smiling at him as he knuckled his eyes. “I’ve something to show you.”

Atrus sat up, suddenly alert. Something had happened. Something … He stared at her. “Was it
real
, Grandmother? Did it really happen? Or did I dream it?”

“It happened,” she answered softly. Then, taking his hand, she led him out, through her own shadowed chamber and onto the narrow balcony.

The moon was two days off full, and though it was no longer at its zenith, its light still silvered the far edge of the pool.

Atrus stood there, breathing shallowly, transfixed by the sight, staring down into the perfect ebon mirror of the pool. Not the pool he’d known from infancy, but a bigger, more astonishing pool—a pool that filled the cleft from edge to edge. Staring into it he let a sigh escape him.

“The stars …”

Anna smiled and leaned past him, pointing out the shape of the hunter in the water. “And there,” she said. “Look, Atrus, there’s the marker star.”

He stared at the brilliant pure blue star then looked up, seeing its twin there in the heavens.

“Is this it?” he asked, after a moment, turning to look at her. “Is this what you were going to show me?”

She shook her head. “No … Come. Follow me.”

In the moment before he emerged from the cleft—in that instant before he saw what his grandmother had woken him to see—Atrus paused on the second top rung of the ladder and looked down.

Below him, far below, it seemed—so far that it was almost as if he had been inverted and now hung out over space—lay the star-dusted sky. For a moment the illusion was perfect, so perfect that, had he let go of the rung, he was certain that he would have fallen forever. Then, conscious that his grandmother was waiting patiently on the other side of the lip, he pulled himself up onto the top of the cleftwall.

And stopped, stone still, his jaw dropped, the sight that met his eyes incredible and dreamlike.

Between the cleft and the lip of the caldera, the whole side of the volcano was carpeted in flowers. Even in the moonlight he could distinguish those bright colors. Violets and blues, dark greens and lavender, bright reds and violent oranges.

He stared, uncomprehending. It was impossible.

“They’re called ephemerals,” Anna said, speaking into that perfect silence. “Their seeds—hundreds of thousands of tiny seeds—lay in the dry earth for years. And then, when finally the rains come, they blossom. For a single day—for one single night—they bloom. And then …”

She sighed. It was the saddest sound Atrus had ever heard. He looked to her, surprised by that sound. There had been such joy in her voice, such excitement.

“What is it, grandmother?”

She smiled wistfully then reached out, petting his head. “It’s nothing, Atrus. I was thinking of your grandfather, that’s all. Thinking how much he would have loved this.”

Atrus jumped down, his feet welcomed by the lush, cool feel of vegetation. The earth beneath was damp and cool. He could squidge it between his toes.

Crouching, he ran his hands over the tops of the tiny blooms, feeling how soft, how delicate they were, then plucked a single, tiny flower, holding it before his face to study it.

It had five tiny pink petals and delicate stamen the color of sandstone. He let it fall.

For a moment he knelt there, his eyes taking it all in. Then, suddenly, a new thought struck him. Jerking around, he looked to Anna.

“The seeds!”

Atrus stood and, picking his way carefully about the cleftwall, stooped here and there, examining all those places where, before the storm had come, he had scattered their precious seeds.

After a while he looked to Anna and laughed. “It worked! The seeds have germinated! Look, Nanna, look!”

She stood there, grinning back at him. “Then we’d better harvest them, Atrus. Before the sun comes up. Before the desert takes back what it’s given us.”

THE WORK WAS DONE. NOW THERE WAS TIME
simply to explore. As the dawn’s light began to cast its long shadows over the sands, Atrus climbed the side of the volcano, Flame in tow, the ginger cat intoxicated, it seemed, by the sudden profusion of flowers. She romped and rolled about as if the years had peeled back and she was a kitten again.

Watching her, Atrus giggled. He wore his glasses now, the sun-filter set low, the magnification high. Now was the time to indulge his curiosity, before the sun climbed too high and the heat grew too unbearable; and before, as Anna assured him they would, the blooms dried up and vanished.

For a time he wandered idly, almost as aimless as the tiny, scrawny cat that was his constant companion. Then, without knowing it, he found himself looking for something. Or rather, not so much looking as trying to pinpoint exactly what it was he’d seen but not understood.

He stood still, turning only his head, trying to locate just what it was he’d glimpsed. At first he saw nothing. Then, with a little start, he saw.
There!
Yes, there in that shallow incline that ran down to one of the volcano’s small, inactive vents!

Atrus went across and stood over it, nodding to himself. There was no doubt about it, the vegetation here was more lush, the flowers bigger, their leaves thicker and broader.

And why was that?

He bent down and, reaching in among the tiny stems, pulled one of the plants up and examined its shallow roots. Earth clung to it. He lifted it and sniffed. There was something strange, something almost metallic about that smell. Minerals. Somehow the presence of minerals—specific minerals?—had helped the plants grow larger here.

He cleared a tiny space with one hand, then scooped up a handful of the earth and carefully spilled it into one of the pockets of his cloak. Straightening up, he looked back down the slope to where Flame was lying on her back in a patch of bright yellow flowers, pawing at the sky.

“Come on!” he said, excited now, wanting to test his theory.

ALMOST THREE MONTHS HAD PASSED NOW
since the day of desert rains. Since then the ten-year-old had labored every evening, stood at his workspace, an oil lamp hung on a peg on the wall at his side, Flame sleeping on the floor nearby as he patiently tracked down which of the chemicals he had found in the sample was responsible for the enhanced growth.

His workroom was in a small, freshly cut alcove at the back of Anna’s room. Working carefully, patiently, over the period of a year, he had chipped the narrow space from the rock with his own hands, using his grandmother’s stoneworking tools, careful to remove the stone a little at a time as she had taught him, checking all the while for weaknesses in the rock, for flaws in its structure that might split and bring the whole wall tumbling down on them.

There was a ledge—a working surface he had smoothed and polished until the surface seemed like glass. Strange-looking technical instruments littered that surface now. Above it he had cut three narrow shelves where he stored his things: narrow cuplike pots made of stone and clay, tiny handwoven baskets filled with various powders and chemicals, the bleached bones of various desert animals, and, on the topmost shelf, his collection of rare rocks and crystals: polished agates like the pouting lips of strange creatures; a large chunk of zeolite, which reminded him of the whiskers of some exotic snow beast; nodules of blue azurite beside a cluster of bright yellow sulfur crystal; a long, beveled finger of icelike quartz, and, in a tiny transparent box, a single tiger’s eye. These and many others crowded the shelf, sorted into the seven systems—cubic, tetragonal, monoclinic, orthorhombic, triclinic, hexagonal, and trigonal—he had read of in his grandmother’s books.

On the wall behind his work ledge was the hanging his grandmother had made for him from the red and blue silk she had bought from the traders that time, its fringed edge decorated with tassels of gold thread. Hand-drawn pictures and diagrams—some his, some Anna’s—filled the remaining walls.

His task had not been easy, not with the basic equipment he had at his disposal. Atrus had thought, at first, that the task would prove a simple one. He had expected to find, at most, three, maybe four different chemicals in the sample, but to his surprise—and dismay—it had not proved anything as straightforward. After weeks of testing, he had identified more than thirty different elements in the sample. The vents, it seemed, were a regular cornucopia of chemical life. Nor was it easy to devise ways to test his theory. His grandmother’s books, which had whole chapters on the shaping and uses of stone and metal, had few entries on agriculture. He had been forced to improvise.