Making the Best, continued
Dec. 21st, 2005 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerI am such a wimp. It took me two hours to work myself up to using the Book, after I wrote that last line. It helped that the Book had a belt loop, which I guessed (rightly) meant it was one of the new Yeesha-style Books that go with you when you link. If my guesses were right, I would need it with me coming and going.
Anyway, after a great deal of pusillanimous prevarication, I finally nerved myself and touched the panel.
The place I ended up was indeed very like the standard Nexus room, the only difference being that the screen imager was larger and there were a few extra controls: six switches with display windows each showing a D'ni number, and a thumb-wheel. I touched the screen to activate it, and a list of names appeared: Ages, dozens, maybe hundreds of them. Names in English lettering again. It was a question, but not one I could usefully address at this point. I scrolled down through the list, seeing some familiar names among the unfamiliar, till I found Myst. It was time to check my guesses.
I touched Myst's name, and the button at the top of the screen rose with a psssh of air. At the same time, the numbers in the display windows changed. I made a note of them, and then pressed what I hoped was the appropriate switch and rotated the thumb-wheel, watching the number in the window grow smaller. Then I pressed the button.
The floor dropped under my feet, and I felt the whole room descend like a lift and come to a smooth stop. The ring of Books in the column rotated, and a Book popped out and opened itself. The picture in the linking panel was dark, lashed with rain and lightning. I touched the panel, and linked.
He was there, as I'd expected. I looked down at the barely recognisable figure, hunched on the floor of the generator hut, pale and sweating and blotchy with fever, the remnants of a meal of raw fish-beastie on the floor beside him, some of it recycled. Poor devil. I fetched the ship from the cracked basin, dribbled rainwater between his lips till he coughed and swallowed. Neither of us popped out of existence. The universe did not implode. There was no reason, after all, why it should.
Awareness trickled into his eyes, and he made an inarticulate sound-shape and tried to fight me off. I stood a moment longer, looking down at him, and then propped the ship carefully just outside the hut where it could continue to catch the rain, and linked back to the Nexus.
This was how she did it. Technology, not magic. Ingenious--an Age written somehow at right angles to time, a lift shaft running from past to future with a Nexus room moving up and down within it, and gods only know how many Linking Books arranged in doughnut rings one above the other, all the way up, all the way down. Who Wrote them all? Yeesha, presumably, the same way she Wrote x thousand identical Relto books. Maybe there's a trick to it. Or maybe that is magic.
I linked back to Myst present day, by resetting the numbers to the ones I had noted. I had some hard reading to do in this very journal. At various points along the way so far I had received help from some mysterious agency, revealed in the course of events, and now confirmed, as (apparently) me. Since I now had the means to provide such help, it was obviously payback time.
And then?
I had my freedom now, more freedom than maybe anyone else in history but Yeesha herself. She had handed me my way home on a plate, and not just home but anywhere I cared to go, anywhen. In the sure and certain knowledge that I wouldn't use it. Not yet anyway. Not till I had seen for myself what had gone wrong with her dream.
Not till I had seen Releeshahn.
Anyway, after a great deal of pusillanimous prevarication, I finally nerved myself and touched the panel.
The place I ended up was indeed very like the standard Nexus room, the only difference being that the screen imager was larger and there were a few extra controls: six switches with display windows each showing a D'ni number, and a thumb-wheel. I touched the screen to activate it, and a list of names appeared: Ages, dozens, maybe hundreds of them. Names in English lettering again. It was a question, but not one I could usefully address at this point. I scrolled down through the list, seeing some familiar names among the unfamiliar, till I found Myst. It was time to check my guesses.
I touched Myst's name, and the button at the top of the screen rose with a psssh of air. At the same time, the numbers in the display windows changed. I made a note of them, and then pressed what I hoped was the appropriate switch and rotated the thumb-wheel, watching the number in the window grow smaller. Then I pressed the button.
The floor dropped under my feet, and I felt the whole room descend like a lift and come to a smooth stop. The ring of Books in the column rotated, and a Book popped out and opened itself. The picture in the linking panel was dark, lashed with rain and lightning. I touched the panel, and linked.
He was there, as I'd expected. I looked down at the barely recognisable figure, hunched on the floor of the generator hut, pale and sweating and blotchy with fever, the remnants of a meal of raw fish-beastie on the floor beside him, some of it recycled. Poor devil. I fetched the ship from the cracked basin, dribbled rainwater between his lips till he coughed and swallowed. Neither of us popped out of existence. The universe did not implode. There was no reason, after all, why it should.
Awareness trickled into his eyes, and he made an inarticulate sound-shape and tried to fight me off. I stood a moment longer, looking down at him, and then propped the ship carefully just outside the hut where it could continue to catch the rain, and linked back to the Nexus.
This was how she did it. Technology, not magic. Ingenious--an Age written somehow at right angles to time, a lift shaft running from past to future with a Nexus room moving up and down within it, and gods only know how many Linking Books arranged in doughnut rings one above the other, all the way up, all the way down. Who Wrote them all? Yeesha, presumably, the same way she Wrote x thousand identical Relto books. Maybe there's a trick to it. Or maybe that is magic.
I linked back to Myst present day, by resetting the numbers to the ones I had noted. I had some hard reading to do in this very journal. At various points along the way so far I had received help from some mysterious agency, revealed in the course of events, and now confirmed, as (apparently) me. Since I now had the means to provide such help, it was obviously payback time.
And then?
I had my freedom now, more freedom than maybe anyone else in history but Yeesha herself. She had handed me my way home on a plate, and not just home but anywhere I cared to go, anywhen. In the sure and certain knowledge that I wouldn't use it. Not yet anyway. Not till I had seen for myself what had gone wrong with her dream.
Not till I had seen Releeshahn.