Fifty: A Cast of the Bones

I left Anna’s body to the wind and the dust and went back down into Star’s Reach when I figured something close to an hour had passed.  I wasn’t the first one to come back to the main room, though that was only because Thu was sitting in his usual chair at the table, where he’d probably been the whole time. He nodded to me; I nodded back, walked over to the table, and stood there waiting, because I couldn’t think of anything else. Everything I’d done and tried to do during the five years since I found the dead man’s letter down below the Shanuga ruins came down to one decision we were going to have to make right then and there. That two of the people I liked best might have to go into the circle with knives to settle the thing didn’t help at all.

A door opened and closed down the hall, and Berry came in next, with the kind of brittle calm on his face you see when people are ready for a fight they don’t want but know they can’t get out of. He nodded to me and Thu, took his seat at the table, folded his hands and waited. About the time he settled into place, another door opened and closed, and Eleen came in; her eyes were red, as though she’d been crying, but she greeted everybody by name, went to her place at the table across from Berry’s and sat.

A good long minute went by, and then boots sounded on the stairway down to the rest of Star’s Reach. Tashel Ban came up them, his face grim.  He didn’t say anything to anyone, just walked over to his chair, pulled it out, plopped down into it and sat there with his chin propped on his hands and his eyes staring at nothing in particular.

I sat down then, and looked from face to face, remembering all the roads we’d walked together in one way or another, and also remembering the others who walked part of them with us and weren’t there for one reason or another.

“The way I see it,” I said then, “we’ve got three decisions to make. The first is what to do about Star’s Reach, the second is what to do about the messages from the Cetans, and the third is what to do about this last message.”

“What to do about Star’s Reach?”  This from Tashel Ban.  “I don’t see much that we can do about that.”

“Turn it over to the ruinmen to break apart for scrap,” said Thu at once. “Find some way to preserve it in its current condition, so the conversation with the Cetans can continue. Abandon it, claim that we found nothing, and leave it for someone else to find.”

“More or less,” I said. “There’s also Anna’s choice, I suppose, but I don’t see much point in that.”

That got a moment of silence, then:  “No,” Tashel Ban said. “I don’t see a point to the last of your three choices, either, and which of the first two we choose depends on what we decide about the Cetans and the others.  That’s the real question, as I see it:  do we tell the priestesses and the Merigan government what we’ve found about the Cetans and the others, or do we destroy the computer up here, erase the data from the mainframes down below, and hand the site over to the ruinmen?”

“How hard would it be to do that?” I asked.

“The second choice?  Stripping the data from the mainframes would be slow—my guess is that that’s why the people who were here before us didn’t do it. Destroying the computers up here? As long as it would take to toss each one of them down the stairwell.”

Eleen drew in a sharp breath and closed her eyes, but said nothing.

“Does anyone disagree that those are our choices?”  I asked then.  Nobody did, and after a moment I nodded. “Then I want to hear what everyone thinks we should do. Tashel Ban, maybe you can go first.”

“If I must.” He didn’t say anything for a while.  Finally:  “When I offered to come with you here, Trey, I had hopes:  not Anna’s hopes, but closer to them than I like to think.  I hoped that if we could get here, find messages from some other world, and figure out how to read them, that might teach us how to live on this planet without damaging it, and still have some of the things they had in the old world.  Not all of them, not even most of them, and not in our lifetimes—but some of them, someday.

“Maybe we will, even so, but there’s nothing here that helps with that, and much that speaks against it. Do you remember what the message from Delta Pavonis IV said, about how they can’t teach us anything we aren’t ready to learn?  That’s something I had learned already from the Cetan messages. Even something as simple as their way of turning sunlight into electricity—and that’s a very simple thing, something we could have figured out long ago if we happened to be looking in the right place—even that took most of a hundred years of work by people here at Star’s Reach to understand, because Cetans don’t think like us or build things the way we do.  Maybe some of the other aliens out there think a little more like human beings, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

“I still think it’s worth saving what we’ve found, and sharing it. Those solar spheres the people here worked out from the Cetan formula would be worth having, and we might be able to figure out a few more tricks like that, given enough time.  But—”  He leaned back, and let his hands fall into his lap. “If the rest of you think that it’s too dangerous, for whatever reason, I’m not going to fight for it. I’ve read messages from aliens, and seen a little of what they and their worlds look like. Maybe that’s enough.”

The room was silent again for a while, and then Thu laughed his soft, deep laugh.

“This is a rich irony,” he said. “Shall I speak next?”  I nodded, and he went on. “You will all no doubt remember our arguments in Sanloo, where Tashel Ban spoke of the hope he has just described, and I spoke of my fear of what human beings might do with any equivalent of the old world’s technologies. He says that what we have found here has betrayed his hopes. Equally, it has betrayed my fears.

“He has reminded us of one part of the message from Delta Pavonis. I will remind you of another part, the part that spoke of making the usual mistakes and suffering the usual consequences.  If so many species have done to their own worlds what we did to ours, and struggled back from the results of that folly the way we are doing, then who can pretend that it was merely bad luck that brought the old world down in flames? Who can ever claim again that we can repeat the same stupidities and avoid the same results?  And especially—” He tapped the table with one finger.  “—especially when some of those others, such as the Cetans, suffered much more than we did.

“I distrust the technologies that can be found here at Star’s Reach, and what human beings might do with those in the future.  I know that some message from another species might someday teach human beings something far less harmless than the solar spheres you have mentioned. I know, for that matter, that it is possible that the message from Delta Pavonis is filled with lies, and the beings who sent it intend some harm by it. Even so, if the rest of you decide that it will be best to share what we have found with the priestesses, the government of Meriga, and the world, I will not demand that the matter be settled in the circle.”

Something like a knot came undone inside me then.  “Eleen?” I asked.

“I don’t want the knowledge to be destroyed,” she said simply.  “If everything we’ve gotten from the Cetans has to be printed out, bundled up, sent to Melumi and locked in a vault for a thousand years, I won’t object, but I don’t want it destroyed. Maybe it’s just because I was trained as a scholar, but the thought of seeing all that knowledge lost  is not something I can face.  If the rest of you decide that that’s what has to be done—” She closed her eyes.  “I don’t know what I’d do.” Opening them again:  “But there are places such things could be kept safely for a very long time, if that’s what it comes to.”

“Do you think they need to go someplace like that?”  I asked her.

“No,” she said at once.  “No, I think it would be better if everyone in Meriga knew about the Cetans and what happened to them, and about the others—the ones from Delta Pavonis, and all the rest. I think—I think it would be better if we could keep on communicating with the Cetans, and take up the others on their offer, but I know the rest of you may not agree with that. I’ll yield on that if I have to, but I want to see the knowledge preserved.”

“Berry?” I asked.

He looked up from the table. “I’m thinking about what will happen when word gets out. Whatever we decide, once people learn where Star’s Reach is, they’re going to start heading this way. Some of them will just want to see it, the way people want to see Melumi or Troy, but some of them may have other plans, and the men and guns to put those plans into action.”

“We came rather too close to something like that already,” said Tashel Ban, “with Jennel Cobey.”

“I was thinking of that,” said Berry. “So whatever decision we make, we need to keep that in mind, and do something to make our decision more than empty wind.”

“That said,” I asked him then, “what do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.  “I don’t want to see the messages from the Cetans destroyed. I’m not at all sure I want to see everything handed out all anyhow to the world. If my—my mother was still alive, I’d say we should contact the government and the priestesses and let them deal with it, but right now? Until a new presden gets chosen, it would be up to Congrus to decide, and I don’t even want to think about the kind of mess they’d make of it.  So I don’t know.”

Another silence came and went.  “Trey,” Eleen asked then, “what do you think?”

I looked from face to face. “I think,” I said then, “that we’re asking questions that are too big for five people to answer.  I’ve got my own preferences—I’d like it if more people found out about the Cetans and the others, I’d like to see those solar spheres turning sunlight into electricity all over the place; I’d like to have people keep talking with the Cetans, and take the others up on their offer to talk—but are those the right choices? I don’t have any idea. If there are answers here at Star’s Reach, it’s going to take a lot of people a lot of time and work to figure them out. That’s more than we can do.

“I think that what we need is to get more people here. We need ruinmen, scholars, and priestesses, to start with, because they’re used to ruins and things left over from the old world, but sooner or later there need to be people who are trained to do the work that needs doing here, and can keep it going for a good long time.”

Eleen was staring at me by then. “What you’re suggesting,” she said, “is that there should be a  guild.”

I hadn’t thought of the word, but the moment she said it I knew it was the right one. “Yes,” I said. “Not like the group that was here in the time of Anna’s parents, closed off from the rest of Meriga, but something like the ruinmen, the radiomen, the scholars—”  Plummer’s guild of rememberers, I wanted to say, but didn’t. “A guild that can work with the priestesses and the government to make sure that what happens here doesn’t do anything wrong or illegal, and still keep the conversations going with the Cetans and the others.”

“You’ll need scholars,” she said, “and I don’t know how many of those you can get to leave Melumi.”

That’s when I figured out the last part of it. “We’ll just ask the ones that aren’t at Melumi any more.” I could see their faces:  Mam Kelsey at the Shanuga camp, the cook at the Wanrij roadhouse, Lu the harlot, all the others I’d met along the way. “The failed scholars. How many of them get turned away from Melumi every year?”

“Anything up to a dozen,” she said. I don’t think she was seeing the same faces I was, but she was lookng past me then, at something I couldn’t see.

“That might work,” said Tashel Ban.  Then:  “It would take money, quite a bit of it.”

“There’s a lot of metal here that isn’t needed any more and could be sold for scrap,” I told him. “That’ll be enough to make a good start. After that—well, how much do you think the chemists would pay to know how to make those solar spheres?”

Tashel Ban whistled. “A very pretty figure.”

“I bet plenty of people would pay a couple of marks to have a picture from Tau Ceti II to hang on the wall, too,” I said. “The money won’t be a problem.”

“As Berry has said,” said Thu then, “your guild will need to be armed, especially at first.”

“That’s why the first thing I think we should do is get a bunch of ruinmen out here,” I said. “Not to strip the place—Berry and I have finder’s rights on it, and they’ll honor that—but to make sure that nobody else will try to take it. People don’t often mess with us.”

“I well remember,” Thu said, with a slight smile.

“Time might be an issue there,” said Eleen. “One of you would have to go back to Cansiddi, talk with the guild there, get enough ruinmen together—”

I shook my head. “I left notes on how to get here at the Cansiddi guild hall, in case we didn’t come back. They’re sealed and locked away, but all it would take is one radio message from me to get them to open it. And if I know ruinmen at all, once word got around that I’d gone west from Cansiddi into the desert, dozens of young misters with no other call on their time would have headed for Cansiddi on the off chance that they might be able to get in on the dig.”

They were all looking at me by then, Berry with the first slight smile I’d seen on his face since we heard that his mother was dead, Eleen still staring at something none of us could see, Tashel Ban giving me his owlish look, Thu unreadable as always.

“It would be a gamble,” Thu said finally.

“If you’ve got a better idea,” I told him, “I’d be happy to hear it.”

He allowed a smile, said nothing. I glanced at the others.  Berry was nodding agreement; Eleen had stopped looking past me at whatever it was, and had begun to smile; Tashel Ban frowned, and then said, “It’s a gamble, no question. Shall we cast the bones?”

No one argued.

Forty-Nine: Too Small A Universe

"She was almost right,” Eleen said.

We were outside, not far from where we’d taken the bodies of the ones who died at Star’s Reach before we came. There wasn’t much left of them, a few odd scraps of bone here and there among the sagebrush, but someone new had joined them. We did our best to save her, but Anna knew exactly what she was doing when she turned the knife on herself.

So we found an old table and hauled her outside on it, the way we hauled what was left of the people her parents knew.  Eleen said the litany for her, we stood there for a long while, and then we walked a little ways off, over to one of the big angular lumps of concrete that hid the antenna elements from the wind and sand.  After a while, the silence got too heavy to bear any longer, and we started talking, quietly, about what had just happened.

“When I was going through the files we’d reconstructed, I found messages among the people who ran things here, talking about the same things Anna mentioned,” Eleen said.  “From the very beginning, there were always a few people who worked here who thought that aliens were already visiting Mam Gaia in flying saucers, and would come down and rescue humanity someday. As long as they did their jobs, the others didn’t concern themselves, just as they didn’t worry about the few who were Old Believers and wanted time off one day out of every seven to talk to their god.

“As the years went by, though, more and more people here came to believe in the flying saucers.  The others worried about that, but the believers couldn’t be spared—Star’s Reach had mostly shut itself off from the rest of Meriga by then, because of the troubles that led up to the Third Civil War, and even if they’d gone looking for help there was nobody else in Meriga or anywhere else who knew how to do the things they needed to get done. 

“So the people in charge worried but didn’t do anything, and the number of believers grew, until finally everyone at Star’s Reach either believed in the flying saucers, or shared the same hope that a more advanced civilization would contact them and help humanity if they just kept working on the project. I can’t fault them for talking themselves into that belief. They needed some reason to keep on, some way to convince themselves that what they were doing mattered to anybody but themselves.  So they traded messages with the Cetans and waited for someone else to contact them. And—”  She spread her hands, palm up, and let them drop. 

“You didn’t say anything about this before,” I said then.

“I didn’t think it was important. There were many other documents; I could have bored you all for two hours every evening, talking about everything we found. It never occurred to me that those messages would explain why they killed themselves.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Berry said then. “They got the message they were waiting for.”

“Except it wasn’t what they were waiting for,” Eleen went on.  “Like Anna, they believed, or hoped, or something between the two, that the aliens who would contact them would be so far ahead of us technologically that they could come here, give us back the kind of energy sources we had in the old world, fix everything we did to Mam Gaia—all that, and more.  They wanted the old world back again, and they thought the aliens would give it to them. And what they got instead was what we just heard.”

None of us said anything for a little while, and then Thu spoke. “The question that occurs to me is whether the message was telling the truth.”

“I don’t know,” Eleen admitted.  “I don’t know of any way we could know.”

“One part of the message is certainly true,” said Tashel Ban. “Delta Pavonis IV is a gas giant with an atmosphere that looks green to us.  Scientists discovered that before the old world ended—and as far as I know, that information isn’t in the computers here at Star’s Reach.”

Thu nodded.  “But that does not tell us whether the beings who sent the message might respond to a reply with something more than a radio message.”

“Like a spacecraft?”

“Or a great many spacecraft.”

Tashel Ban shook his head.  “If they could do that, they wouldn’t have had to send a message and wait for a reply. They could have sent a spacecraft as soon as they detected our signals, found out whatever they wanted to know, and followed up with a fleet, if that’s what they had in mind. But—”  He held up one finger.  “If they could do that, we’d have been visited a long time ago; Delta Pavonis is only twenty light years away.”  He held up a second finger.  “And we’ve been receiving messages from the Cetans all along.   They apparently got the same message we did; I don’t know whether they answered or not—we haven’t taken the time to decode the messages from them that are stored in the main computers down below—but they’ve been trying to talk to us ever since, and waiting for a reply.  If somebody came calling from Delta Pavonis IV, that didn’t disrupt the Cetans’ transmissions at all.”

“There’s one thing more,” said Eleen then. “I mentioned the debate about whether progress could go on forever. There was one argument against that theory that nobody ever managed to push aside. It’s called Fermi’s paradox, after the scholar who first thought of it.”

“I have heard of it,” said Thu.

“I haven’t,” I said.

Thu nodded, and Eleen went on. “Even when scholars still believed in the Big Bang, they knew the universe had been around for at least thirteen billion years, and there had been plenty of stars with planets long before Mam Gaia was formed.  If other intelligent species evolved during those thirteen billion years, and interstellar travel is possible, then they would have been all over the galaxy long before our time, leaving traces we couldn’t miss. There are no such traces. The most likely reasons for that are either that we’re the first intelligent species to evolve in this galaxy, or that interstellar travel isn’t possible. Once we contacted the Cetans, the first reason stopped being a possibility—two intelligent species less than eleven light years apart means that intelligent species are fairly common. That leaves the other, which most scholars back then didn’t want to think about.”

“None of that is conclusive,” said Thu.

“True,” said Tashel Ban. “If you want conclusive proof, though, it’s twenty light years away.”

“Or ten,” said Berry.

“True enough,” Tashel Ban replied. “The Cetans probably know one way or another by now. I wish we could ask them.”

“Actually,” said Berry then, “we can.”  The pale tense look he’d had since we heard about his mother wasn’t exactly gone, but there was something past it, something that flickered and glowed like a flame.

“In theory, yes,” said Eleen. “But we’d have to finish working out the code—”

“Not just in theory.” He glanced from Eleen to me to Tashel Ban to Thu.  “Let me show you.”

So we left Anna to the wind and the blowing sand, and went down into Star’s Reach again. Berry led the way to his room, opened the door, waved us in. The stacks of paper were still scattered all over every flat surface but the floor. He went straight to one stack on his desk, took a sheet of paper off the top, and handed it to Eleen. “I think you can read this.”

She glanced over it, then stopped, read it over again with eyes going wide. “Yes.”

“If you’re willing,” Berry said.

She nodded, considered the paper for a moment longer. “There’s a center from which movement radiates outward, linked to radio frequency and to this end of the communication—oh, of course. ‘Our radio station.’ Then there’s a reference to a previous state of flow, but the flow drops away to nothing—‘stopped transmitting to you.’ A spatial-subset indicator, and then interference patterns—‘because of local troubles.’ I think I can read the rest: ‘and was abandoned for a time.  The troubles have ended, the sphere—no, the planet, our planet, is unharmed, and we have reoccupied the station. We will resume regular communication once we review past messages and finish learning how to send new ones.’”

We were all staring by the time she finished.  “Berry,” I said then, “you worked that out yourself?”

“I kept wondering about the Cetans, what they were thinking after our transmissions stopped. It seemed only fair to let them know we were still here.”  With a little shrug:  “And I didn’t have much else to do, other than wash dishes and help with the computers when I could. So I started printing out messages and translations at night, and tried to figure out how the code worked.”

Tashel Ban had taken the paper from Eleen, and was reading over it. “The syntax is correct,” he said. “If we sent this, I’m quite sure the Cetans could read it.”

I was looking at Berry, watching a slow smile slip past the pale guarded lines of his face, when I realized what had to happen next.  “That’s not prentice work,” I said. “Give me your pry bar.”

He stared at me, then without a word went to his work belt, got the bar, and handed it to me. I hefted it, then flicked out the sharp end good and fast, catching him on the face just under the cheekbone. I heard Eleen gasp, but by then I was holding out the pry bar for Berry.  “Take it, ruinman,” I told him.

He took it, and his face lit up the way mine must have, down in the Shanuga ruins where Gray Garman made me a mister.   For a moment he looked as though he was about to say something, and then gave it up and flung his arms around me. I patted his back and looked past him at the others. As he drew away, I said, “Eleen, Thu, Tashel Ban, I’d like to introduce Sir and Mister Berry of the ruinmen’s guild of—well, of Star’s Reach, for now.”

So of course they all congratulated him. While Tashel Ban was doing that, though, Thu turned to me. “For now,” he said. “It seems to me that certain decisions need to be made.”

“I know,” I told him, and he nodded, once, as though that settled something.

I waited until the congratulations were over and Berry was dabbing something on the cut I’d left on his face, and then said, “ Well. We know as much as we’re going to know about what’s here, and you know as well as I do how much food we’ve got left. We’ve got some choices to make—but I’m going to need a little time first, to think about everything that’s happened.”

Nobody argued.

“An hour, perhaps?” This from Thu.

Nobody argued about that, either, and so I turned and went out into the hallway.

I knew where I needed to go, though I didn’t know why, not at first.  The metal stair boomed beneath my footsteps, and the door groaned open, letting in a spray of dust.  A moment later I was outside, underneath the empty desert sky, with the concrete antenna housings stretching away into the distance on all sides and the low dark shape that used to be Anna, lying there where we’d left her.

I thought about what little I knew about her and her life, the circle through time that brought her back here to the death her parents managed to escape. I thought about the things she’d said about the false stars and the priestesses; I thought about the alien-books we both read, and the promises that sounded so true to her and so false to me, and where the difference was; and I stared past her, back eastwards to the place where the ground pretends to meet the sky.  That’s when I figured out why she died, and why the people who were here at Star’s Reach before us died, and maybe, just maybe, why the all those billions of people died when the old world ended: their universe was too small.

I don’t know if that will make the least bit of sense to anyone else who reads this, if anyone ever does. After I wrote those five words, I sat at the desk here in the little room I share with Eleen in Star’s Reach, with the point of my pen not quite touching the paper, for something like a quarter of an hour. I must have decided half a dozen times to scratch the words out, and half a dozen more times to spend the next half dozen pages trying to explain what I meant, and changed my mind each time.

Still, it’s simple enough.  The people who wrote the alien-books, and most of the stories that were in the shelves with them, didn’t think that the universe was big enough to hold distances that couldn’t be crossed or problems that couldn’t be solved. I don’t think anybody in the old world ever dreamed that things like that could be waiting for them out there between the stars.  It wasn’t that people back then were just plain wicked, the way the priestesses say; they really believed the universe was small enough that they could make it behave, the way Plummer says they used to make animals behave in sirks.  That’s why they ignored so many of their problems until it was too late to do anything about them, and why they told themselves stories about flying saucers and space travel and how we were all going to go to the stars someday, where we’d find lots of people like us and lots of planets like Mam Gaia, because they didn’t think the universe was big enough to hold anything else.

That’s what I figured out, as I stood there looking east across the desert.  I figured out something else, too, which is that we’ve learned something now that they didn’t know, back in the old world.  That was when I knew what I was going to say when the hour was up, and it was time to decide once and for all what we were going to do with what we’ve found here at Star’s Reach.

Forty-Eight: At A Table Of Stars

I realized,about the time Tashel Ban pressed the key and started the program, that there’s more than one kind of silence.  There’s ordinary silence, and there’s deep silence, and then there’s the sort of silence that you get when everything seems to stop, just like that, and hang there in the stillness until the silence breaks.  That last kind is how silent it was there in Star’s Reach as we stood around the computer and watched the screen go black.  After a while, some words appeared in the middle of the screen:

please wait

So that’s what we did. Lights down on the body of the computer flashed and flickered as though they were frantic about something.  Around the time I was wondering if the thing was calling home to somewhere off past Tau Ceti II and waiting for the answer, a red point appeared at the center of the screen, and then grew into a ball that turned slowly. More words appeared:

Is something visible on the screen?  y/n

Tashel Ban tapped the Y key.  I swear the sound echoed off the walls of the room.

Is it a sphere?  y/n

He tapped it again. 

Is it red?  y/n

Another tap.  A moment later, a sound like a flute playing one note came out of the computer.

Can you hear the sound? y/n

Tashel Ban tapped the same key.

“Can you hear this voice?” It was the computer, no question, talking out of the little holes on both sides of the screen, but it sounded like a woman’s voice, cool and calm and not quite saying the words the way they’re supposed to be said.

“Yes,” said Tashel Ban.

“Is it speaking the English language?”

“Yes.”

“Is it clear and understandable to you?”

“Close enough.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

I think we all looked at each other just then. “Yes,” Tashel Ban said after a moment.

“Thank you,” said the voice. The red ball vanished, and the screen stayed black for another longish time while the little lights on the computer body went frantic again.  Then stars appeared, coming out slowly the way they do after sunset, and in the middle of them something that nobody in Meriga has ever seen and everybody in Meriga knows:  what Mam Gaia looks like from space.

“This is your world,” said the voice. All at once, Mam Gaia shot away into distance, as though the screen had turned into a window on a spaceship like the ones in all those stories I read.  After a bit you could see the sun and the other planets scattered around it, and then everything else fell into the sun and the sun turned into a little white star out there among all the other stars, and then you could hardly see the sun at all.  The spaceship, if that’s what it was, slowed down; another sun came past on one side,  and then another world came into view, big and pale green and covered with swirls and stripes.

“This is ours,” the voice said. “You would call it the fourth planet of the star Delta Pavonis.”

The screen turned and plunged down toward the planet.  Green swirls filled it, and then all at once we were in among the swirls, in a place where the sky was pale green and big white clumps of something else that might have been clouds drifted past, and there was no ground at all, just sky above and below and as far as you could see in every direction.  Something drifted into sight, something that looked a little like a clump of soap bubbles with a lot of thin feathers dangling down from it, but the feathers were moving and the soap bubbles got bigger and smaller as it drifted on by.

“That’s one of them,” Eleen said in a whisper.

She was right, too.  Two others came into the screen, and the voice said, “You cannot visit our world and meet us, but if you could, this is what you would see.”

The image drew back, so we could see hundreds of the bubbles-and-feathers things, drifting around in the green sky.  “More than four million of your years ago,” the voice said, “our species reached the stage of complex technology.” Something like a vast heap of soap bubbles and spiderwebs came into sight, glowing with points of light; I guessed it was a city, or something like one.   “We made the usual mistakes, and suffered the usual consequences.”  The image changed; the sky turned brown and murky, and another of the city-things came into sight, torn, lightless, empty. “Our recovery was long and difficult.  Afterwards, we began reaching out, as you have, to try to contact other species on other worlds.

“We succeeded.” Another of the city-things appeared, tiny compared to the first, but with something I guessed was an antenna spread out over what must have been a huge piece of green sky.  “Other worlds had already contacted one another by radio, beginning almost twenty-two million of your years ago. There are thirty-eight species currently in contact with one another.  If you and the species you call Cetans both choose to open radio contact with us, you will be the thirty-ninth and fortieth.  Our world is closer to your world and the Cetans’ world than any of the others, and we have been listening to your radio communications for many of your years now, so it is our place to invite you both to enter into communication with us. Here are the other species who are waiting for your answer.”

One at a time, as the voice went on, pictures appeared on the screen.  Every one of them had something toward the middle that must have been an alien, and something behind it that must have been an alien world, but that’s about all that I can say about most of them.  As I write this, I’m remembering one of them, a little like an upside-down flower with seven long fleshy petals, or maybe they were feet.  The petal-feet were orange and so was the body of the flower, where the petal-feet came together in a spray of long thin drooping spines.  Around the top of the body, where the stem would be, were a couple of dozen stalks with bright blue cones on the end of them; I guessed they were eyes.  The alien stood on what looked like yellow sand, or maybe it was snow, and something like yellow fog swirled around it.  The reason I remember that alien is that it looked more like a human being than any of the others did. 

“Your messages to the Cetans, and theirs to you, have taught us much about how you communicate and how you understand the universe,” said the voice, as the aliens appeared and disappeared.  “The message you received from us was designed to launch a set of self-replicating patterns that can adapt themselves to any information technology.  Those patterns analyzed your technology and your means of communication so that this message could be given to you in a form you can understand. If you choose to accept our invitation, the analysis will be sent to us by radio, and we will be better able to understand what you say to us thereafter. If you accept our invitation, we know that you will have many questions.  We can anticipate certain of these and will answer them now.

“Most species, when first contacted by one of the worlds already conversing with one another, want to know if we can travel to their world, or bring them to one of ours.  We cannot.  Most of the technological species we have contacted have attempted space travel, and made, as you did, short trips to nearby moons and worlds.  That much can be done, at a great cost in energy and resources. To travel from star to star, however, involves a cost in energy and resources that no species known to us has ever been able to meet, and technological challenges that no species known to us has ever succeeded in overcoming.  You are free to make the attempt, and other species will gladly teach you what they have learned from their failures, but we cannot offer you any hope of success.

“Most species want to know if we can help them repair the damage to their world that they did when they first reached the stage of complex technology.  We cannot.  We can share our own experiences with you, and other species can do the same, but each world that supports life has its own unique patterns and problems, and the experiences of other species on other worlds may be of little help to you. At best, principles learned from those experiences may be of use to you, if it happens that you have not yet learned them yourselves.

“Most species want to know if we can teach them sciences and technologies they have not already learned for themselves.  We can try, but this is less easy than you may yet realize.  You will already have learned from your communications with the Cetans that different species understand the universe in very different ways, that many of the things you think are true about the universe are actually reflections of the deep structures of your own organisms, and that many more depend on conditions on your world that are not found elsewhere.  We encourage you to tell us about your technology and the ways in which you understand the universe, and we will gladly try to share our knowledge with you.  We will marvel at what we learn from you, but much of what you share with us, we will never fully understand; and you will find the same experience waiting for you.”

The parade of aliens finished, and then the screen showed the green sky of Delta Pavonis IV and the bubble-and-feather things floating in it.

“When our species first reached out to find other beings on other worlds, we expected to find beings much like us, living on worlds that were much like ours. We found ourselves instead communicating with beings we can scarcely imagine, living on worlds we will never fully comprehend. You will find the same thing.

“Thus we cannot solve your problems; we cannot come to you or take you to some other world; we cannot teach you anything you are not ready to learn. All we can offer is the chance to communicate with other intelligent beings, to try to grasp something of the way we and other species experience our worlds, to share your own experiences with others who are eager to learn about them, and to know that you are not alone in the universe. If that is enough, we welcome you to the conversation between worlds.

“Please communicate this message to the appropriate members of your species and make the decision according to your ways. We await your reply.”

The screen went black again, and words appeared a moment later:

You may repeat the message at any time. After each repetition, this device will ask if a decision has been made, and if the decision is favorable, you will receive instructions on how to proceed.

I have no idea how long it was after the words appeared that anyone talked or moved.  I know that I spent a good long time staring at the screen, thinking about the green skies and bubble-and-feather creatures of Delta Pavonis IV and the other aliens, scattered across who knows how much of space, talking to each other since long before our first ancestors followed whatever hint Mam Gaia gave them and climbed down out of the trees in Affiga, if the priestesses are right and that’s where it happened.  I thought of the blobby yellow Cetans, who practically seem like friends and neighbors to me, and wondered what they thought when they got the same message, the same offer to sit down around a table made of stars and talk, knowing that whole lives would pass by between asking a question and getting an answer.

“The usual mistakes,” said Thu.  It was a moment before I realized he was quoting the voice.  “And the usual consequences.”

“I was thinking about that, too,” Tashel Ban replied. “Also about what it means that they can send a program to a computer they know nothing about, and still get results like the ones we’ve seen.  That shouldn’t be possible.”

“With four million years of practice?” Eleen pointed out.

“Twenty-two million years,” said Thu, “if they learned the trick from others.”

That brought another long silence. I don’t know for sure that everyone else was thinking about what that much time means, but I certainly was. 

“There was a debate,” Eleen said then, “back in the old world, about technology. Almost everyone then thought that technology could just keep on progressing forever, becoming more and more powerful, until it could do anything. There were a few scholars who pointed out that everything else follows what’s called the law of diminishing returns. Trey, if you’re digging for metal in a ruin, the longer you keep digging, the harder it gets to find metal; am I right?”

“True enough,” I said.

“What these scholars were saying is that knowledge works the same way, and technology works the same way.  So the kind of thing that Anna—”

Her voice trailed off.  After a moment I realized why.  Anna was nowhere in the room, and from the blank looks on everyone’s faces, nobody had seen her go.  A cold thought stirred, and I thought I knew where she would be; I turned away from the computer and headed at a run to the room where the old alien-books were.

I was wrong, but as I got there I heard something hit the floor in the kitchen. I turned and sprinted that way, and there she was, lying in a puddle of blood with her hands on a knife and the knife in her chest.  Her eyes were already staring up at nothing as the last color drained out of her.

Forty-Seven: The Last File on the Computer

Last night, after I finished writing, I wasn’t ready to sleep yet, and so I slipped out of the little room Eleen and I share and went into the big space where the people who were here before us used to grow their vegetables.  The glass block skylights up above were pure black, no trace of starlight in them at all, though I was pretty sure it was a clear desert night and plenty of stars were looking down on this side of Mam Gaia’s round belly. I sat on the edge of one of the concrete tubs full of dirt where the vegetables used to be, and looked back up at them.

I was pretty sure that something was going to happen the next day, something big. Tashel Ban and Eleen were busy at the computer until late, and she came to bed with a look on her face that wasn’t the one I expected. Ruinmen talk about trying to get through a concrete wall by pounding your head against it, and I’m sure the scholars in Melumi have a more elegant way of saying the same thing; I know the look Eleen gets when that’s what she’s been doing, but that wasn’t the way she looked.

She looked frightened. Not frightened as though something’s come lunging out of the darkness at you, the way Thu came at me on that night in Memfis; frightened as though everything you thought you could rely on just dropped from beneath your feet, the way—I was about to write “the way the floor dropped from beneath my feet in the Shanuga ruins,” but I knew better, any ruinman’s prentice past his first season knows better, than to think you can ever rely on an old concrete floor.  No, what I ought to write there is the thing I’m still trying to work up the courage to write, and that’s what happened when we first reached Star’s Reach and Jennel Cobey died.

One way or another, I’m going to have to write about that sometime soon, and sometime not too long after that I’m going to have to deal with the consequences.  When a jennel gets killed, there are going to be consequences, and I don’t have any reason to think it’s going to matter much to the people who matter that he was the one who put the two of us in a situation where one of us was going to get reborn in a hurry, and all I did was decide that it was going to be him.

But I sat there and stared up at the night, and thought about the frightened look on Eleen’s face, and all the things we’d learned about the Cetans, and the night stared down at me and didn’t say a thing. Finally I got tired enough to sleep, and went to bed.

The next morning I was up before it was light.  It was my turn and Anna’s to make breakfast, and so I washed and dressed and headed for the kitchen. She was already there, which was unusual. We didn’t see her much before breakfast unless it was her turn to help with the cooking, and even then she’d get to the kitchen when things were well along and do most of the serving to make up for it. This time she was waiting. She didn’t say much most mornings, and this morning she smiled her knife-curved smile, and watched me out of the corners of her eyes, and didn’t say a word.

I don’t think any of us said a dozen words during breakfast. Everyone knew that something was about to happen; people don’t live together as long as we have, here at Star’s Reach, without getting to sense when a discovery’s been made or a problem’s come up.  The longer breakfast went on, the thicker the silence got, until finally Tashel Ban drained his cup of chicory brew and said, “When the rest of you are finished, there’s something Eleen and I have found that we all need to talk about.”

The rest of us were finished. Berry and Thu took a couple of minutes to clear the table, but nobody even thought about washing the dishes.  Tashel Ban waited until they were back at their places, then leaned forward onto his elbows and said, “We’ve found the last thing that was put on the computers before the people here died.”

He stopped there, and after a moment I said, “And?”

“I have no idea what to make of it.  It’s not a document.  It’s a program, a huge one, and we can’t figure out what it is or what it’s supposed to do.  It’s—” He gave us all his owlish look.  “I’m not at all sure how much of an explanation you would prefer.”

“Details,” said Thu, “are more useful than generalities.  Please go on.”

Tashel Ban sat back in his chair.  “I don’t claim to know everything about the way computer programs were put together back in the old world, but I know a fair amount.  The Nuwingan government has a few computers that are still in working order—I’m pretty sure the Merigan government has some, too—and I’ve worked on ours, to the extent of writing code for simple programs. Look at a program written for the kind of computer they put here at Star’s Reach, and you know what to expect—what the files look like when you view them, and so on.

“The program we’ve found is gibberish. Or it looks like gibberish. It’s got things woven into it that are ordinary pieces of programming code, but they seem to be lifted out of other programs in the computer, and do things with those other programs or the operating system that runs the computer. The rest of it is nonsense, letters and numbers and other things all jumbled together without any structure I recognize at all. But—” Here he leaned forward again. “I don’t think it’s actually nonsense. There are patterns in it. I just can’t figure out the first thing about them.

“So we tried to figure out where it came from and when it was used—you can find that out from inside the computer if you know how—and that’s when things got truly puzzling. The program ran just once, a few hours before the people here tried to delete all their files and then shut everything down. It was downloaded onto the computer a day before, by another program, a huge one.  This other program was downloaded onto the system four days before that, spent all four of those days doing something I can’t figure out, and then deleted itself. 

“Then we tried to find out where the big program came from, and that’s what kept us busy most of yesterday. It looked as though it just popped up out of nowhere—until we thought of checking the logs for the main radio receivers. That’s where it came from. There was a radio message, a long one, that repeated itself over and over again—” He moved his hands in a circle. “And somehow that set up a repeating pattern all through the communications and computer system here, and the big program somehow unpacked itself from that.  I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think anyone anywhere knows how to do that.”

“Clearly someone did,” Thu pointed out.  “I wonder if it came from Sisnaddi.”

“Not those receivers,” Tashel Ban told him.

It took just a moment for that to sink in.  When it did, Thu’s eyes narrowed.  “You are saying that the program came from—”  A motion of his chin pointed upwards. “Out there.”

“As best we can tell, yes.”

I thought I understood then. “So it’s something from the Cetans?”

“That’s the question we asked,” Tashel Ban said. “But the program doesn’t look anything like what the Cetans send, and it doesn’t correspond at all to what the people here before us were able to learn about Cetan computing.”

I was still trying to get my head around that when Berry spoke.  “That message,” he said. “The one that brought the program.  When did it arrive?”

“That was the next question we asked,” Tashel Ban told him. “I gather you’ve guessed the answer.”  Then, because Thu and I were both looking puzzled:  “The main antennas point whichever way this part of Mam Gaia is facing. Right now, they’re facing Tau Ceti in the morning hours. More than a few hours to either side, and—” He shrugged.  “They’re pointing to another part of the sky.”

That’s when I realized what he was saying. “So it’s—someone else.”

“Apparently so,” said Tashel Ban. “And I have no idea what to make of that.”

We all stared at him, and then someone laughed.  It was a dry, harsh laugh like paper tearing, and it took me a good long moment before I realized that it was coming from Anna.

“Forgive me,” she said, still laughing. “Of course you don’t know what to make of that. You haven’t been looking in the right place.”  She looked straight at me, then. “You understand. Or you should. You’re the only one who read the books they left for us—the only one but me.”

I knew right away what she meant, but before I could think of any way to answer her, Tashel Ban said to her, “Perhaps you can explain it to the rest of us, then.”

“If you wish.” She looked at him, and then at the rest of us. “The Cetans aren’t the reason all of this is here.  They were the one species who answered the radio messages we sent, because they’re right about the same level of technology we are, and they haven’t been contacted yet by the Others.” The way she said that last word, you could tell she would have written it with the capital letter. “The Others are the reason Star’s Reach was built.”

“Another species.”  This from Thu.

She gave him something I’d have called a pitying look from anybody else.  “Thousands of other species,” she said.  “Millions of years more technologically advanced than we are. They have ships that can travel from star to star in less time than it took us to walk here from Cansiddi. They have answers to all the questions human beings tried and failed to find back in the old world.  They were already visiting this planet before the old world went away.  One of their ships crashed here, at a place called Roswell, off in the desert, and that’s when the government back then started building Star’s Reach, to make contact with them, to talk to them and get the technologies that would keep the old world from ending the way it did.

“But they wouldn’t answer.  We weren’t ready for first contact, not then, not for a long time afterwards. They knew that if they landed, if they even communicated with us openly, people wouldn’t be able to bear knowing that we’re nothing more than a backward species on a backward planet that need all the help the Others can give us.” She gestured outwards, the movement sharp as broken metal. “Think of all the people in Meriga who spend their days praying to Mam Gaia.  What would they do if they suddenly found out that their Mam Gaia is nothing more than a grain of dust spinning around an ordinary star in an out of the way corner of the galaxy?

“So the Others didn’t contact us.  They didn’t think we were ready.  They didn’t contact the Cetans, either, and so we and the Cetans made contact with each other, and spent a couple of hundred years talking back and forth by radio.  And maybe it was that—”  She stopped, and shook her head.  “Maybe it was that, that we were able to communicate with an alien species and bear it, that convinced the Others that we were ready to be contacted.  And when they contacted us, we still weren’t ready.”

“You think that’s why the people here killed themselves,” said Eleen.

“I don’t know,” Anna admitted.  “I’ve told you already everything I remember; it was a long time ago, and I was very small.  Still, once I got here and started reading the books they left for us, it all made sense.  And—”  She gestured again, palms up.  “There were plenty of books here when I was a child.  I remember shelves and shelves of them everywhere.  They must have burned most of them, but they left the shelf of books about the Others for us to find.  Why?”

“Tell us,” said Eleen.

“To give us the chance to figure out ahead of time that the Others are out there.  I don’t think they expected anyone to be able to read the computer files, the way you have, but they probably guessed that when Star’s Reach was found, we’d start talking to the Cetans again, and sooner or later the Others would try to contact us a second time. That’s what the program’s for, I’m sure of it—a way to contact them, or a message from them.  They’re still waiting out there with their advanced technology—waiting for us to be ready to welcome them, waiting until they can make this world even better than it was before the old world ended. Waiting to come down and take humanity to the stars.”

There was a light in her eyes like nothing I ever saw there before.  All at once I remembered the books we’d both read, the alien-books and the stories about futures out there in space that never happened, and I knew what was in her mind.  I’d read the books and scratched my head and wondered, but she’d read them and believed all of it, and I thought I could guess why.  “Anna,” I asked her, “did your parents tell you any of this?”

She turned to face me then.  “A little,” she said.  “My mother told me about the Others just before she died. I didn’t know what to make of it. Now I do.”

No one else said anything. I glanced around the table.  Tashel Ban had his owl-look on; Berry was pale and distant; Thu still as an old stone. It was Eleen’s face that caught my eye, though; she was watching Anna with an odd, sad look. It took me a moment to realize what it meant:  Eleen knew something about all this, something she wasn’t saying. What?

I didn’t know, and there was something that had to be settled right away.  “Tashel Ban,” I said. “Can you make the program run?”

He nodded.  “All I have to do is type in the command.”

“Thu?”

He was the one who mattered most, just at that moment.  If he decided it was time, we’d clear a space for a circle, he and Tashel Ban would go at each other with knives, and if it was Tashel Ban’s time to bleed out his life there on the floor, I’d have Berry or Eleen delete the program and that would be the end of it, until whoever sent it decided to try again.  That was the agreement we had, and if that was the way things had to go, I knew it would be better to get it over with at once.

Thu thought about it for a moment, then shook his head.  “The program has been run once before, and it did not bring spaceships down from the skies. I will not invoke our agreement on the mere possibility that this thing would violate it. If it proves to be a message or gives access to a technology, then it may be necessary to settle the matter in the circle.  Not until then.”

“I think,” I said then, “we need to run the program, and find out what it is.”

“Even though the last people who ran it killed themselves?” Berry asked.

“We have to know,” I said, and after a moment, he nodded.

So we all got up and went over to the computer.  Tashel Ban typed at the keyboard for a bit, and then glanced back at me.  I nodded, and he hit the enter button.

Forty-Six: The Thing That Still Needs Doing

There are days when the air here in Star’s Reach feels the way it does just before the thunder rolls and the rains come, and this was one of them. Tashel Ban and Eleen spent all day and most of the evening huddled over the computer, muttering to each other or taking turns pounding on the keyboard; there’s something odd about the last document on the computer, the one the people here wrote just before they killed themselves, but those of us who don’t know how to make sense of the gibberish on the computer screen are going to have to wait for some other day to find out what it is. You don’t ask Tashel Ban to explain anything when he’s working—if you do, he gives you that owlish look of his, and then just goes back to work without saying a thing—and Eleen almost fell asleep during dinner, so I got her into bed as soon as I could afterwards and didn’t bother asking questions.

Then there’s Berry.  Ever since the news came about his mother he’s been as pale and silent as a ghost, doing his share of the cooking and cleaning and then vanishing back into his room.  The one exception is the hour when the radio broadcast comes in from Sanloo; he spends that hovering over the radio—Tashel Ban taught him how to run the thing—and then listening, still as stone, to the news when it came in.  Tonight there wasn’t much new, just a speech by somebody important in Congrus who said nothing at all in the most graceful way you can imagine, and some guessing about how soon the funeral’s going to be. I was  in the room with him, partly because I wanted to know what was happening back home in Meriga, partly because Berry’s my prentice and my friend and I figured he could use the company.

He didn’t say a thing until the broadcast was over and the last of the music faded back into hisses and crackles.  Then, suddenly, he turned toward me.  “Trey,” he said, “do you know the thing I’m sorriest about?  It’s all the nonsense I told you about who I am and why I ended up as a ruinman’s prentice.”

It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about.  “The business about your mother being an Old Believer and all that.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you had to say something.”

He tilted his head, considered that.  “You’re probably right. Still...”

“Did you really grow up in Nashul Core?”

A quick shake of his head denied it.  “I spent some time there, so I could make the story believable if anybody who knew the place asked questions.  No, I grew up in the Warrens of Sisnaddi Core. My mother wanted me close, so she could visit me sometimes, and one of her servants came to check on me pretty often.”

“So there are people in Sisnaddi who know about you.”

His face tensed.  “Some.  Not many, and I hope they keep their mouths shut.”

We talked a little more, I forget about what, and then he turned off the radio and said goodnight and went back to his room.  I watched him go, and then went back to the main room, where Tashel Ban was hammering at the keyboard as though he meant to keep at it all night, and Thu was sitting over in the opposite corner doing one of his meditations, and Anna was finishing up the dishes.  She saw me come in, gave me and Tashel Ban her sidelong look, and then smiled to herself.  She doesn’t smile often, and I’m just as happy for that.  This one was worse than usual; it curved like the blade of a knife.

So I went back to the room Eleen and I share, made sure she was sound asleep, and started writing.  Well, to be honest, I sat here thinking for a long while, and then finally picked up the pen.  Ever since last night, when I wrote about the conversation Plummer and I had in the field outside the tents of the Baraboo Sirk, I’ve been thinking about what we’re going to do once we finish up here, and especially what I’m going to do.  Partly, of course, I’m wondering about what’s going to happen to Meriga, and whether there’s going to be any safe place at all, even for a ruinman, if we get a fourth civil war; partly, there’s Plummer’s offer; partly, there’s what happened to Jennel Cobey, which I’m going to have to write about one of these days, and I still don’t know what’s going to happen because of that; partly, there are all the places I passed on my travels where every scrap of ruin was stripped bare by ruinmen long before I was born, and wondering what’s going to happen to the guild when there aren’t enough ruins left for us to work; and of course partly I’m thinking about the fact that I managed, by sheer dumb luck and a lot of wandering, to find the place that everybody’s been looking for since the old world came crashing down, and what do you do after you’ve done that?

I didn’t have any answers, so finally I started writing, and remembering what happened after I stumbled off to sleep in the Baraboo Sirk’s big tent.

The next morning I woke up early and lay there in the darkness for a moment before I remembered where I was and what I was doing there. I stretched and brushed bits of straw off me and went outside.  The sun hadn’t quite gotten around to peeking around Mam Gaia’s belly; there were a few pale stars still shining overhead and more of them off to the west.  More to the point, there were clattering sounds and just a bit of smoke coming from the smaller tent where Plummer and I had dinner the night before, and if there’s one thing you learn when you’re on the road, it’s that a good hot meal comes way up on the list of things to look for.

So that’s where I headed.  Ellis was already there, and so were a bunch of other people from the sirk, and they waved me over as soon as they saw me; we all said our good mornings, and then I said I’d be glad to help get things loaded up if there was anything I could do, which is how you ask for breakfast on the road.  That got me a big plate full of bacon and hotcakes and a mug of chicory brew, and I sat with them and mostly listened as they talked about the day ahead and the trip up to Clumbs.  It was like having a meal with ruinmen or members of any other guild; Ellis was the mister, the performers were the senior prentices, and the others had their place, right down to the big men who hauled things and handled the oxen.  They were as friendly as you could ask, but there was never any question who was in the guild and who wasn’t.

Afterwards, I paid for my breakfast by hauling on ropes and carrying rolls of canvas tenting over to the wagons.  That was hard work, but it’s nothing I hadn’t done plenty of times already as prentice and ruinman, so I didn’t mind.  Once everything was done and the first of the wagons was rolling out of the field, Ellis thanked me and told me that any time I happened by where they were, I was welcome to a couple of meals and a free show; he didn’t have to say that I could pay for it with a few hours of work, but again, that’s the way you do things on the road. So I thanked him and said I’d keep an eye out for their posters, and he gave me a big grin and climbed aboard the last wagon. I waved as they headed north, and only then realized that nobody all morning had so much as mentioned Plummer’s existence.

I spent a good part of that day thinking about that, and about the people Plummer talked about the night before, his guild of rememberers. It was a good day for thinking; the weather was clear and not too warm, the road dry but not yet dusty, and there weren’t that many people traveling the way I was going, which was across the Hiyo and down into Tucki. That was out of my way, strictly speaking; Sisnaddi was only another couple of days ahead if I kept going along the north banks of the Hiyo; but I wasn’t in all that much of a hurry to get there, and I wanted to visit Berry and make sure everything was working out between him and Cob.

There used to be a bridge across the Hiyo at Madsen; of course it’s gone now, but there’s a ferry there, a big one, that goes back and forth across the river. I paid the couple of bits it cost to get on, and sat next to the water as the engine groaned and puffed and the Hiyo rushed past. Then I was in Tucki again, heading south on roads that weren’t much more than cart tracks, past farms and fields and big patches of forest.  It all reminded me of the country Berry and I walked through, back at the very beginning of our search for Star’s Reach; and that reminded me of how far I’d traveled and how many things had happened since then. If I’d been on one of the busier roads, with plenty of people to talk with and everything, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but I was alone a lot of the time, and that meant I didn’t have anything to do but think, and wonder what was going to happen when I finally admitted to myself that the whole business had been a waste of time.

I was pretty much convinced by then that that’s how things would turn out.  Now and then I tried to talk myself into believing that I could find something in the archives at Sisnaddi, some piece of paper with the letters WRTF on it that would point me to the place I needed to go, but the further I went south into Tucki the less likely that seemed.  I walked past old bits of ruin here and there, rounded chunks of concrete rising up a little ways out of the grass, and it occurred to me that they were telling me that what was left over from the old world didn’t really matter any more.  Another hundred years or so of rains pounding down on the concrete, wearing it away a bit at a time; another hundred years or so of ruinmen stripping metal out of anything that might pay for another day’s room and board; another hundred years or so of people in Meriga and all over Mam Gaia’s round belly living their lives in ways that made sense, instead of chasing some wild dream of talking with creatures from some distant world—what would be left after that but a few old stories about a time when we tried to touch the stars and almost killed Mam Gaia and ourselves doing it?

So that’s what I was thinking as I walked south day after day from Madsen to Lebna.  From there the empty nuke was only a few hours more south and east; I left Lebna after noon, saw the gray towers looming up within an hour or so, and got to the place where the trail led down off the road well before sunset.  I could hear voices down below, and followed them down to Cob’s camp.

Cob and Berry and Cob’s prentice Sam were busy hauling chunks of metal out of a half-stripped building when I got there.  Berry saw me first, let out a whoop, and came pelting over to throw his arms around me; Cob and Sam were less excited but not a bit less welcoming, and so we stood there and talked for a bit, and then I helped with the hauling until we’d carried as much out as was ready to move By then it was getting on for time to eat, so we all went into the main building, and Cob and I talked while Berry and Sam got dinner ready.  Not much had changed since we’d been by; the ruin still had plenty of metal in it, and Cob was doing well enough that he had money put aside in the guild at Lekstun for when he got too old to work.  He’d thought about getting another prentice or two, but never quite gotten around to it, so it was no trouble at all to have Berry there, quite the contrary.  “You got yourself a good one,” he told me more than once.  “Prentices like that aren’t so easy to find.”

Then dinner was ready, and we ate bean soup and bread, just as if I was back at the Shanuga ruins, and talked the way ruinmen do. I was watching Berry and Sam, though, and after dinner was over and the two of them had hauled the dishes off and were washing them and chattering in one of the other rooms, I turned to Cob and said, “Those two look like they’ve gotten pretty close.”

He snorted.  “You could say that.”

I’d pretty much figured out already what he was hinting at, though it surprised me more than a little. “You know Berry’s a tween?”

“So’s Sam,” said Cob.

“I didn’t know,” I managed to say then.

“Well, there you have it,” said Cob.  “I figure, Mam Gaia bless ‘em, it’s not as if they’ve got lots of other people to pick from, and as long as it doesn’t keep ‘em from doing their work, it’s not exactly any of my business.”

I nodded, and we talked about something else after that. Still, that night when everybody else was asleep, I lay on my pallet and thought about that.  Of course Cob was right; I don’t know of any reason why a tween couldn’t get as friendly as he wanted with a man or a woman, take your pick, but it’s not something that happens, or at least if it happens nobody talks about it.  The priestesses like to say that it’s nobody’s fault but the ancients’ that some poison from the old world got into somebody’s insides and messed with their children’s children, and of course they’re right, but a lot of people still aren’t comfortable around tweens at all, and let’s not even talk about sharing a bed.

I went to sleep thinking about Lu the harlot, and all those pretty women in Memfis, and the others I’ve bedded since I got old enough to take an interest in girls.  The next morning I woke up early; Cob was still snoring, though the other two pallets were empty, and I slipped outside and stretched and decided to go down to the creek at the bottom of the little valley to wash up. I got most of the way there before I heard water splash, and then Berry’s voice, low enough that I couldn’t make out what he was saying; I looked around, and saw Berry and Sam sitting on the bank not ten meedas from where I was.

They were paying too much attention to each other to notice me, which is just as well, because it didn’t take much work to figure out what they’d been doing, and what they were probably going to do again before long.  I backed away fast and quiet, and went to a different part of the creek, on the other side of the ruins.  By the time I finished and came back to the main building, Cob was awake and breakfast was cooking.  The way Berry and Sam said their good mornings to me, I don’t think either one of them had the least idea I’d seen them.

So I ate my breakfast and thanked Cob for his hospitality, and loaded up my bags and left.  I could have stayed.  The whole time I was there, I knew that if I asked Cob if he wanted another pair of hands to help with the ruins, he’d welcome me, and I could get back to the work I knew how to do, breaking down a ruin bit by bit and selling the metal.  I could have stayed, and left dreams about Star’s Reach to somebody else.

That’s not what I did, though.  I climbed back up the trail to the road, and started walking toward Lebna. The journey wasn’t over, I knew that right down in my bones, and I had to follow it out to the end even if there was nothing at all waiting for me there.

The funny thing was, I wasn’t brooding over it, not any more.  When I was walking from Memfis up to Ensul, before I met Plummer again, I couldn’t keep my mind on much of anything other than what I was going to do if nothing turned up at Sisnaddi, and then on the way from Madsen to Cob’s camp I didn’t think of much else.  Now that Sisnaddi was just a few days away, it was like the last few days at a ruin before the rains come in or the work runs out: you don’t worry or argue or complain, you just figure out the thing that still needs doing, and then you do it.

So I walked north and a little east, following the roads through farm country that got richer and more thickly settled the further I went.  The fifth day after I left Cob’s ruin, toward the middle of the afternoon, the road I was on bent around a low hill, and ahead of me I could see a dim gray shape in the distance, too flat on top to be a hill and too big to be anything else, rising up against the very bottom of the northern sky.  I couldn’t see the wind turbines on top of it or the big arches that let light into the upper part of it here and there, but I knew right away that it was Sisnaddi Core.