The Myst Reader by Robyn Miller Page A

changed. “
Where
did you say you found it?”
    “In the volcano,” he said, his voice less certain than before. “Near where the battery had fallen.”
    She stared back at him. “In the tunnel?”
    “Yes.”
    Slowly Anna reached out and took the fire marble from his hand, holding it up, she dropped it suddenly into the bowl of water at her side. Instantly it was extinguished.
    “You must not go there again, Atrus. It’s very dangerous down there.”
    “But grandmother …”
    She stared at him, her normally gentle face harder than he had ever seen it. “You must not go there again, Atrus. You’re not ready yet. Promise me, Atrus, please.”
    “I promise.”
    “Good,” she said, more softly, reaching out to rest her hand upon his shoulder.

     
    EACH AFTERNOON, AS THE SUN BEGAN TO descend and the shadows spread across the foot of the cleft, Anna and Atrus would sit in the cool shade on the low stone ledge beside the pool and talk.
    Today, Atrus had brought his journal out and sat there, the ink pot beside him on the ledge, copying out the word Anna had drawn on a loose sheet. For a while he was silent, concentrating, his keen eyes flicking from Anna’s drawing to his own, checking he had the complex figure right. Then he looked up.
    “Grandmother?”
    Anna, who was sitting back with her head against the cool stone wall, her eyes closed, answered him quietly. “Yes, Atrus?”
    “I still don’t understand. You say there’s no English equivalent to this word. But I can’t see why that should be. Surely they had the same things as us?”
    She opened her eyes and sat forward, stretching out her bare, brown toes, then, placing her hands on her knees, she looked at him.
    “Words aren’t just words, Atrus. Words are … well, let me see if I can explain it simply. At the simplest level a word can be a label. Tree. Sand. Rock. When we use such words, we know roughly what is meant by them. We can see them in our mind’s eye. Oh, what precise
kind
of tree, or sand or rock, for that we need further words—words which, in their turn, are also labels. A large tree. Or, maybe, a palm tree. Red sand. Or, maybe, fine sand. Jagged rocks. Or, maybe, limestone rocks. The first word alters our sense of that second word in a fairly precise manner. At another level, words can represent ideas. Love. Intelligence. Loyalty. These, as I’m sure you see at once, aren’t quite so simple. We can’t simply add an extra word to clarify what we mean, particularly when the ideas aren’t simple ones. To get to the real meaning of such concepts we need to define them in several ways. Love, for instance, might be mixed with pride and hope, or, perhaps, with jealousy and fear. Intelligence, likewise, might refer to the unthinking, instinctive intelligence of an ant, or the deeper, more emotionally rooted intelligence of a man. And even within men, intelligence takes on many separate forms—it can be slow and deep, or quick and sparkling. And loyalty … loyalty can be the blind loyalty of a soldier to his commander, or the stubborn loyalty of a wife to a man who has wronged her. Or …”
    She saw he was smiling. “What is it?”
    He handed her the loose sheet back. “I think I see. At least, I think I know what you were going to say.”
    Anna found herself grinning, pleased, as ever, by his quickness, his perceptiveness. Atrus rarely needed to be told a thing twice, and often, as now, he was way ahead of her.
    “Go on,” she said.
    Atrus hesitated, tilting his head slightly, as he always did when he was thinking. Then, choosing his words carefully, he began. “Well, just as those words that describe ideas are a level above the words that are simple descriptive labels, so there’s a farther, more complex level above that. One which this D’ni word functions on.”
    “Yes, and?”
    “I see that, but …” He frowned, then shook his head. “What I can’t see is what could be more complex than ideas. I can’t picture in my