9 – Fragments, Part 1
Brittany sank down into her car. It was hot. She turned the key. The engine made a protesting sound and refused to start. Swearing, Brittany tried again, and once more, before popping the hood and getting out. Why she bothered to pop the hood, she didn't know, as she had no idea how to fix an internal combustion engine.
"Atrus?"
Atrus looked up from his writing. "Yes?"
"My car won't start."
Atrus got up, took one look at the engine in Brittany's car, and sighed. "My friend, if this was a D'ni vehicle, I could help you easily. But your technology is very different from ours. I'm afraid I've no idea where to start."
"Hmm." Brittany scratched her chin. "Well, I suppose I'll have to take Rachel's car. She won't mind. I'll be back in an hour or two, Atrus."
"I'll be done by then, my friend. I'll head back to Tomahna via Myst when I'm finished."
"Okay," replied Brittany, getting into Rachel's car. She depressed the brake, then the clutch, and turned the key. The engine started with a roar and a belch. Atrus coughed.
"Our technology is also far less smelly," he muttered, going back to his writing.
As Rachel materialised on the small hexagonal platform that marked Amateria's link-in point, she was struck by two things immediately. The first was the fact that this world appeared to consist of a massive system of train tracks. The second was a blast of freezing wind, making Rachel gasp. The weather here couldn't have been more different to that on J'nanin – whilst it was a hot, cloudless, still day on J'nanin, here on Amateria it was windy, cold and very overcast. In the distance, a bolt of lightning flashed across the choked sky, and the ominous rumble of thunder followed a few seconds later.
Jordan linked in beside her, then Maddy. They, too, gasped as the cold wind enveloped them. The three of them took a minute to huddle together and at least somewhat acclimatise to Amateria's rather harsh weather, then surveyed the world that faced them.
"What is it?" Jordan said after a minute.
"I think it's a..." Maddy paused, "...a rollercoaster."
The tracks that Rachel had seen earlier wound all over the age, they saw as they explored, with three major areas forming what appeared to be puzzles that they had to solve to make the rollercoaster work properly. The tracks all stemmed from and ran back to the massive central building, which they couldn't access but which appeared to be the nerve centre of the entire age. After wandering through the entire age and coming full circle, returning to the platform where they had linked in, they paused to discuss.
"So," begain Jordan, "it looks like there's three different areas that we need to repair before we can get the symbol. There's the balance bridge thing..."
"The one with the pegs," continued Maddy.
"And the sonic rings," finished Rachel. "So where should we start?"
The engine of Rachel's car whined in protest as Brittany slowed down. Cursing, she changed down to third. The engine purred with delight and the needle on the rev counter leapt up as though stung.
It was always difficult for Brittany to drive a different car, especially when that car had a manual transmission. Brittany had always been of the opinion that a manual transmission was unnecessary in a car. But, she was in the minority, and so had learnt to drive one anyway.
She braked again as she approached her street, clumsily shifting down to second. She touched the indicator lever to signal left, and the windscreen wipers came on.
Atrus closed the small book and wiped sweat from his brow. It was hot, even in the shade of the volcano. He gathered up his things and went inside the house. Pausing to consider whether it would be rude, he eventually sat down, pulled out his bottle of water and drank deeply from it. Ah... that was much better. Now...
He stood up and walked over to the door into the bedroom. He knocked, then realised what a stupid thing to do that was.
Inside, he went straight to the bookshelf. He ran his finger over the spines of the books, glancing through the titles. There were a whole variety of things – building and repairs, gardening, cookbooks, parenting... Eventually, he found the one he wanted – an old, battered, grey tome. He pulled it off the shelf and went out to the kitchen. He opened the book to the last page and placed it down on the table, staring down at the page. He breathed deeply, trying to prepare himself, and touched the page, stepping forward into the darkness and out onto the wooden dock.
Nope... no amount of mental preparation could make visits to this island any less painful. Atrus sighed out loud and, despite himself, turned to look over the island. He had meant to go straight to the library and on to Tomahna, but he just couldn't help himself. As he walked through the forest, breathing the deep scent of the pine trees, he saw that very little had changed physically. Everything was intact and working. But it was mentally that things had changed. The things that had happened here... it was painful enough anyway, but the fire on Tomahna just made it even more painful. This island would never be an option to live on again. As far as he was concerned, it should be abandoned. It was.
He stooped down when he reached the grave of his grandmother. The grass was overgrowing the stone, but her name still read clearly. Ti'ana.
After a minute, he stood up, resolute now. He walked, briskly now, to the library, where two solitary books glowed on the shelf. One for K'veer, one for Tomahna. He opened his satchel, pulled out the book he had written at the volcano and placed it, open, next to the others. The Cleft.
We can't keep using this island as a travel nexus for D'ni, he thought. It's too painful.
He touched the glowing panel of the Tomahna book and vanished. And once again, Myst fell silent.
Jordan examined the wooden ball that sat up on a smaller track near the main tracks leading towards the balance bridge. It was composed of eight smaller pieces – seven wood, one a sort of crystal.
"So," he called down to Rachel and Maddy, who were standing by the controls, "what does this do?"
"Watch," called back Rachel, "and stand back." She pulled a switch on the control board.
Behind the bridge, they saw the top of the central building rise up into the air. A single ball of ice dropped out of it, and they heard it strike the track and roll towards them. The ball flew around the track and bumped the smaller ball, sending it rolling down the smaller track and almost bowling Jordan over. The smaller ball clicked into place below the bridge. The bridge tipped up in response – it was not balanced. The iceball flew into the bridge instead of onto it, and shattered.
Jordan came down and joined the girls. "I think what we have to do is make the bridge balance perfectly. So, there must be a counterweight or something that we have to add weight to, so that it weighs the same as the small ball."
"But how do we know how much the small ball weighs?"
"I think I know," piped up Maddy suddenly. "Come on, I'll show you."
Jordan and Rachel followed Maddy back to the J'nanin linking book sitting in a sheltered area just near the link-in point. They stepped through, linking back to the shattered tusk. Maddy led them down to the hut under the tower, and went over to the hammock where they had found Saavedro's journal.
"Look at that." She pointed at a small set of scales. In one bowl was a ball, made of the same crystal substance that had made up some of the small ball. In the other bowl sat four wooden balls, exactly the same size as the crystal ball. The scales were balanced exactly.
"So... one unit of crystal weighs the same as four units of wood?" Jordan was beginning to see it.
"There's more." Maddy pointed over at the workbench, where another set of scales stood. This one had four crystal balls on one side, and on the other, a single iron ball. Again, the scales were perfectly balanced.
"Right..." said Rachel. She wasn't much good at maths.
"I think what Mop is trying to say," said Jordan, who was, "is that if a block of wood weighs one unit, then a block of crystal weighs four and a block of iron weighs sixteen."
"Exactly," replied Maddy, "which means that since that small ball had one crystal block and seven wood blocks, it weighs eleven units."
Rachel now had a headache, but decided not to question this apparent wisdom. The three of them, now confident that they knew what to do, returned to Amateria and went straight to the bridge. Beyond the controls for the device was a small room. Inside, they discovered what they had been looking for – a counterweight. The counterweight consisted of a hemispherical wooden base on which wedges could be placed, and there were even some spare wedges sitting on benches around the room, although it looked like there used to be more, as there were some broken shards of wood and crystal lying on the floor.
"So," said Jordan, "the base is four wooden segments, so it weighs four units already. We want it to weigh eleven, so we need to add seven units. Seems simple enough."
Unfortunately, they quickly discovered, it wasn't. There were only two intact segments of each material in the room, and to add seven units they would need three wood segments.
"Well," muttered Maddy, "so much for that idea..."
The three of them trooped slowly back out to the bridge to examine it again. It was then that another idea struck Jordan.
"Hey..." he said, "that wheel in the middle of the bridge. That's like the pivot. It looks like it can be moved."
"Yeah," replied Rachel, "it can be on the left, on the right, or in the middle. But what difference does that make?"
"A lot, actually," replied Jordan. "Elementary physics. If the pivot is in the middle – like it is now – then both weights have to be the same to make it balance. If it's on the left, the leverage means that the weight on the left has to be twice the weight on the right, and vice versa."
"So..." Maddy considered this, "if we put the pivot on the right, then the counterweight would have to be half the weight of the small ball, or..." she counted on her fingers, "five and a half. Which isn't possible. But if the pivot was on the left, the counterweight would have to be twice the weight of the ball. Twenty-two."
"The base is four already," said Rachel, in an effort to sound like she knew what they were talking about.
"Right," replied Jordan. "So we could add eighteen to the counterweight and it would work."
The three of them returned to the counterweight room. Maddy picked up an iron segment.
"One iron is sixteen," she said, placing the segment on the counterweight.
"And two wood," said Jordan, picking up one wood segment in each hand, "makes eighteen." He placed these on the counterweight as well.
"So that might just work," said Maddy.
Back at the controls, Rachel pushed the pivot slider to the left. With a grinding of ancient gears, the wheel rolled to the far left of the bridge.
"Fingers crossed," muttered Jordan, and pulled the switch to send a ball. The top of the central building rose up into the air, and another iceball dropped onto the tracks. It flew around, just like befotre, knocking the small ball down its track and into position below the bridge. The bridge shuddered, but remained level, and this time the iceball hurtled across the bridge safely. They heard it click back into the central building.
Jordan, Rachel and Maddy smiled at each other triumphantly. Before they could say anything, however, the control panel in front of them clicked and whirred, descending into the pillar. A sort of lid closed over it, with a pattern of hexagons on it. The three of them looked at it in puzzlement, then shrugged and moved on.
Brittany heaved a rather heavy bag backwards out of her front door and fell down the stairs. Something in the bag shattered, and olives spilt everywhere. Brittany cursed again, rubbing her knee where she had just grazed it.
"Not a good day, huh?" Brittany turned to see the man in black perched on the bonnet of Rachel's car. "Let me give you a hand with that." He slid forward, landing on his feet, and walked over to help Brittany pick up the olives.
"Thanks," sighed Brittany.
"You're bleeding," remarked the man conversationally.
"Beg pardon?" Brittany frowned. The man pointed. Brittany looked down – he was right; her knee was dripping blood slightly.
"Here," said the man, rummaging around in his coat and extracting a band-aid. Brittany took it gratefully and applied it to her knee. They straightened up, lifting the bag between them, and loaded it into Rachel's car boot.
"Thank you so much," sighed Brittany. "That really helped my day." She paused, then decided to continue. "Could you answer me something?"
"I can try."
"Will the others make it back okay?"
The man paused. "Almost certainly," he replied after a second. "Just remember that they are very intelligent. They – and you – survived on Myst ten years ago, and back then you knew even less about Atrus, D'ni and the books. You had a lot to learn."
"Muhkhon tagahmtahv," murmured Brittany under her breath. The man smiled.
"Very good. But anyway, I must be going."
"Hang on. Can I ask you just one more thing?"
"It would seem that you just have. You may ask me one more thing, however."
Brittany sighed. "How much longer?"
The man smiled sympathetically. "Not much longer. Not much longer at all."
If my D'ni grammar is dreadful, I apologise - what Brittany said was meant to mean "much knowledge". I would appreciate it if one of my reviewers with a better grasp of the language would correct me if I am mistaken.