Thirty-Four: The Things We Can't See

Earlier this evening Eleen and I were in bed together, and talking. It’s been a while since we had the chance to do that or, well, much of anything else but sleep in the same bed. She’s been working with Tashel Ban day after day on the computer, as often as not from first light to late in the evening. The rest of us finally sat the two of them down two days ago and told them that it wasn’t going to do anybody any good if they worked themselves to death, and they agreed to take it a little easier.

Well, to be a little more precise, we made them take a couple of days off. Berry, who’s been learning how to run the computer from Tashel Ban, promised that he’d keep an eye on it in case anything happened, and the rest of us bullied the two of them into going to bed. I don’t know how long Tashel Ban slept, since he wasn’t the one I was supposed to bully, but I can say for a fact that Eleen didn’t do much yesterday but eat and sleep, and she slept pretty late today, too. During the day, since Berry was still standing guard over the computer, she spent some time with me in the room where all the alien-books are. Her idea, which I should have come up with myself but didn’t, was to go through all the books at once, and sort out the alien-books from anything else we found.

I figured it wouldn’t do her any harm to sit and read a bit, so I hauled books and we sorted them, and by the time dinner came around we had one really big pile of alien-books and another, much smaller pile that was mostly stories, with a few other things we couldn’t figure out. I put the books from the small pile on the top shelf, and all the alien-books on the ones below, so I’d be able to pick something different to spray and bundle up when the thought of leafing through one more book about Roswell and people being kidnapped and how the government was going to have to ‘fess up any day now was just that little bit more than I could take.

At dinner Tashel Ban and Thu swapped stories about Jinya pirates they’d tangled with, and everyone else ate and drank and hoped that we wouldn’t find anything that would force the two of them to take care of their argument the old hard way, knife in hand, in a chalk circle four meedas across. Afterwards we lounged around for a while, talking about nothing in particular, and then Eleen and I went to the room we share and things pretty much followed from there.

Afterwards we lay curled up around each other, feeling warm and comfortable and not saying much for a while. I was hoping Eleen would fall asleep, because I was pretty sure she still needed more rest, but instead she shifted and said, "All those books about flying saucers."

"What about them?"

"I can’t help thinking about the people who spent their lives waiting for the aliens to land, back in the old world. There were millions of them, you know."

I didn’t, not until then. "The government had that many people fooled?"

"It was more than that." She moved, settled on her back. "There’s a thing called the Big Bang effect."

"That sounds fun," I said, and kissed the nearer of her breasts. She laughed and said, "Not that kind . In the old world, right up until a few years before it ended, scholars believed that the whole universe started out with a big explosion: the Big Bang."

I gave her a puzzled look. "How could that be the beginning? If there’s an explosion, you have to have something to explode first."

"I know. That’s what they thought, though, and they had reasons for it. Did you ever hear something go by you fast, making noise?" She moved a hand past my head and whistled, and the whistle dropped from high to low as the hand went by.

"Sure."

"That’s called the Doppler effect—the way the sound is higher in pitch when it’s coming toward you, and lower when it’s moving away. The same thing happens with light, and when scholars studied the stars, they found that the light from the stars is redder—lower in pitch—than it would be if they were still. So they figured all the stars are flying apart, like bits of stuff from an explosion. Do you see?"

I nodded. "But..."

"There’s more. There was also a theory about the way the universe was put together, written by one of the most famous scholars back then, a man named Einstein. There were many ways to make the math in the theory work out, but the simplest way only works if the universe is getting bigger." I gave her a baffled look, and she went on: "Again, think of an explosion. Something small gets much bigger."

"But.." I tried again.

She put a hand over my mouth. "And some scholars figured out that outer space had just a bit of heat in it, more than they thought it should have, and they decided that the heat was left over from the explosion. So everyone thought, well, the stars are moving away from us, and the theory of relativity works best in an exploding universe, and here’s the heat from the explosion—it’s got to be true."

She took her hand off my mouth, and I said, "But none of those proves that."

"Of course not." Then, smiling: "Why not?"

"Because something else could have caused each of those things."

"Exactly." She kissed me, then said: "If A causes B, and B shows up, that doesn’t prove that A must have happened—not unless you know for certain that A’s the only thing that can cause B. People forget that. They forget it all the faster if A can cause B, and C, and D, and all three of those things show up—it’s easy to think that A’s got to be the cause. If things come up that don’t fit the model,people don’t weigh things evenly; they don’t say, B and C and D suggest that A happened, but E and F and G and H suggest that it didn’t. They take each piece of contrary evidence one at a time: here’s E, but E by itself doesn’t outweigh B and C and D, and neither does F by itself, and so on. So you can end up with far more evidence against a theory than for it, but nobody notices, because they’re taking the evidence for the theory all together, and the evidence against the theory as though each piece stands all by itself. That’s what scholars nowadays call the Big Bang effect."

"So how did they figure out that the Big Bang didn’t happen?"

"Somebody figured out that there’s another effect that makes starlight look redder when it comes from further away. It wasn’t the Doppler effect after all. Then somebody else took a second look at Einstein’s theory, and it turned out that some puzzles that nobody had been able to solve were easy to work out once you realized the universe wasn’t getting bigger. The heat had other explanations, too, but nobody had time to figure out which was right, because that’s as far as they got when the old world ended."

"There must have been a mother of a lot of embarrassed scholars."

"It was much worse than that." Her face went somber. "The Big Bang was the foundation of most of what had been worked out in half a dozen sciences. People spent their entire lives working on theories that depended on it—and suddenly there they were. I don’t think any of them killed themselves, but there were scholars who kept on insisting that it was all wrong and the Big Bang was real until they went back into Mam Gaia’s belly. It was that or admit that they’d wasted their lives."

I’d realized a while earlier where she was going with all this. "And the people who believed in the aliens, they made the same kind of mistake."

"Yes, but there was even more reason for them to make it. I was taught that the people who believed in flying saucers thought the aliens were about to land and solve all our problems for us. When the old world was ending, most people hoped that something like that would happen—that somebody would somehow fix everything, so that the old world didn’t have to end. So every light in the sky, and every story about—what was that place in the desert?"

"Roswell."

"Yes. Every story about Roswell, every faked picture and faked sighting the government put into circulation, and everything else, had to add up to aliens visiting Mam Gaia, or the last scrap of hope they had was gone." She shook her head. "So they waited, and waited, and waited, and the flying saucers never landed. For all I know some of them are still waiting, the way the Old Believers wait for their god to come back."

I thought I could name at least one who was still waiting for the aliens, but right then Eleen turned to face me and reached for me. "Waiting?" she asked.

"Not any more," I told her, and I didn’t, either.

Afterwards, we curled up again, and a little after that she fell asleep. I waited until I was sure she was good and deep, then slipped out of bed and got some clothes back on.

The hallway outside the room we share was as hushed as it must have been in the years between when Anna’s people left it and when we arrived. I closed the door as quietly as I could and went down to the room where the alien-books were. It was dark and empty. I turned on the light, and noticed that there was a gap in one of the shelves where I’d put the alien-books earlier that day. It was just about wide enough for one large book. I looked at the gap for a moment, and wondered who else was reading about aliens—Anna, or one of the others?

After a bit, I pulled down one of the stories from the top shelf and tried to read it. It was another of those make-believe stories set on other worlds, like the one with the worms I mentioned a while back; this one was about someone who figured out how to predict the future, and the future he saw coming was the fall of an empire like Meyco’s, except this one covered the whole galaxy. It was a good story, too, and I’ll go back and read it tomorrow, but just then my mind kept on wandering off and I finally put the book down and just sat there on the floor with my chin in one hand.

I was thinking about Eleen—about how we met, which I’ve already written about, and how we met again in Sisnaddi after I’d come back from the Lannic shore where I’d found the one thing I needed to know to find Star’s Reach and watched the Spire fall and run for my life from the wave that came after it. I’d come back along the same road through the mountains, past Cumlun and Pisba and then down the Hiyo to Sisnaddi, every step of the way on foot because all the money I had in the world just then was barely enough to keep me fed, never mind pay my fare on a riverboat.

The ruinmen’s hall in Sisnaddi isn’t part of Sisnaddi Core, of course. It’s a bunch of big shapes like mushrooms that rise up out of the tumble of buildings west of Core where the chemists, the burners, and the other guilds nobody lets inside the city walls live and do their work. What that meant is that I walked all the way around Core to get to the ruinmen’s hall, signed myself in, put up with the pitying looks from the old ruinmen there who were sure I was wasting my life chasing Star’s Reach, and went to the big west doors of Core just as soon as I’d washed up and gotten something to eat. Not three hours later I was back out the west doors of Core with a scrap of paper in my pocket that told me where Star’s Reach was and how I was going to get there.

I could have gone back to the ruinmen’s hall and showed it to the old men there, but I knew they wouldn’t believe I’d found anything that mattered, so I went to the big tavern right outside the west door with every intention of spending the last of my money getting thoroughly drunk. They probably would have had to carry me back to the ruinmen’s hall that night, too, except that I walked in the door and nodded to the barmaid and found myself staring straight at Eleen, who was sitting over by the side of the room at a little table with a glass of cheap whiskey in front of her and a look on her face that told me everything I needed to know right away.

After I got over the surprise of seeing her, I went over and stood in front of the table until she noticed me and looked up. She didn’t say anything at all, not at first, just looked at me.

"Mind if I join you?" I asked.

That got me a smile. "Not at all." She waved at the chair across the table from her.

She was still wearing a scholar’s gray robe, but the only reason a scholar from Melumi would be in a cheap tavern in Sisnaddi was if she’d failed and been sent away. I knew that, and she knew I knew it, and so neither of us had to say anything about it at first, which was probably for the best. "Did you have any luck finding Star’s Reach?" she asked.

"Not yet." I wasn’t ready to tell her about what I’d just learned. "Both the places you found for me turned up empty—not that that’s your fault."

"Thank you for saying that." She tilted her head, considering me. "Are you still looking for it?"

"Not bright enough to quit," I told her.

That got a laugh, and she reached past her drink with both hands, and took hold of mine. "Good."

So I got a glass of whiskey to match hers; I got a little drunk and she got a little more drunk, and talked about nothing in particular, and the end of it all was that I didn’t get back to the ruinmen’s hall that night. We stumbled up the stairs to the sleeping room she’d hired with the last of the money they’d given her when she left Melumi, and spent that evening pretty much the same way we spent this one.

The next morning, I told her about what I’d learned in drowned Deesee and what I’d found in the archives, and said, "I’m going to need a scholar to come there with me, and I’d like it to be you."

She thought about that for a moment. Then, bitterly: "I’m a failed scholar."

"That’s what ruinmen always hire."

She blinked, and then straightened a little. "I didn’t know that."

"It’s not like scholars who are still in the Versty will camp with us in the ruins, you know."

She blinked again, and I could just about see her thinking through what it meant to have a place in the world again, not to mention work that could pay her keep and maybe a lot more. "I suppose not." Then: "Trey, if you’re willing to take me, I’ll go. I’ll go anywhere." She put her arms around me. "Among other things, you’re good to spend time with, you know."

Of course I kissed her then, and since she wasn’t wearing anything and neither was I, things went pretty much the way you’d expect from there.

We’ve been together ever since then, all through the months of negotiating with Jennel Cobey, getting in touch with the others in our party, traveling west, getting here, surviving those last horrible moments out in front of the door, and then doing what we came here to do. Even now, though, I’m not sure whether we love each other or whether we were just two lonely people who needed each other for more reasons than one. I can point to B and C and D, that’s for sure, but is A what’s behind them all, or something else? The priestesses say that behind the things we see there’s another world we can’t see, and everything here is like a shadow or a reflection of something there. Maybe they’re right, but sometimes I wonder whether there can be anything in that other world that’s harder to see than the inside of another person’s heart.

Thirty-Three: In The Stream Of Time

When you’re a farm boy growing up in the Tenisi hills and you think of riverboats going up and down the Misipi, one of the words that comes to mind is fast. There’s plenty of reason for that; riverboats are the fastest things people have in Meriga these days, barring a lake schooner or a big square-rigged merchant ship with a good wind helping out, and when you’ve walked along the banks of the Misipi and watched one riverboat after another show up out of the distance behind you, roll right on upstream past you, and vanish in the distance ahead, it’s hard to think of them as slow.

When you’re on board a plain working boat, though, it’s hard to keep that in mind, because you don’t spend much time racing along with the current. Certainly we didn’t do much of that on the way to Memfis. Every few hours through the day, some little town came into sight, the Jennel Mornay puffed up to the levee and sat there for a good long while as things got offloaded and a few people clattered down the landing stage, and then bales and barrels and sacks got hauled on board by the roustabouts to go downriver to Sanloo or Memfis. Once that was done, it was back out into the river, but that still meant that maybe one hour in three went into pulling up to the levee, pulling away from the levee, or sitting there with nobody but the roustabouts doing much of anything at all.

Come evening, whatever little town came next was where we stopped for the night. They say that riverboats used to travel by night a long time ago, but these days there’s too much danger from snags and sandbars. A good pilot might risk a night run when the moon’s full and there’s money to be made, but usually the risk’s not worth taking, and so come evening the boats tie up at the nearest town. The ship’s officers eat dinner in the main cabin with the passengers who can afford cabin fare, the crew eats down on the main deck with the passengers who can’t, and everybody but whoever’s on watch goes to sleep until first light tells the engineer it’s time to heat up the boiler again.

Thinking back on the trip down the river, it occurs to me that that’s one of maybe three times in my life that I haven’t had work to do for a good long time. The first time was during the few months between when my mother and I went to Shanuga after my father didn’t come back from the war, and when I got taken on as a ruinman’s prentice; the second was on the riverboat heading for Memfis; and the third time—well, that’s here and now, because even though I’m sitting in the biggest ruin that’s left in Meriga, there’s not that much for a ruinman to do just at the moment, other than turn the pages of old books about aliens, and wonder what Eleen and Tashel Ban are going to find next, and tell the story of how I got here in the pages of a notebook that nobody’s probably ever going to read.

I didn’t even have that much to do on the way downriver to Memfis, and Berry was mostly down on the main deck, making friends with the engineer and watching the steam engines run. I’d have done the same thing at his age, and might have done it even at mine if I didn’t have as much to think about as I did. Still, there it was; I had a lot of time to myself, and spent most of it standing on the walkway that ran along the outer edge of the cabin deck, thinking and watching the Ilanoy forests and fields roll by.

That was when I understood, deep down, just how small Meriga is nowadays compared to what it was back in the old world. By that I don’t mean just that it lost all the land it did to the Meycans and the Neeonjin and the coastal allegiancies and Nuwinga, or the half a continent or so between the Suri River and the Neeonjin country that nobody lives in any more because it’s all dust and sand. What I mean is that even the land that’s still inside Meriga’s borders these days fits Meriga the way my father’s overalls would have fit me when I was five years old. There’s just not that many people in Meriga, not compared to how many there used to be, and it shows.

I saw that over and over again as the banks of the river rolled past. We’d come to some town with a hundred buildings or so, the sort of lively market town you find all through Meriga where farmers bring their crops in for sale and buy what they need from the blacksmith, the leatherworker and the bulk goods store, and one glance from the walkway around the cabin deck showed the traces of the same town back in the old world, when it was ten or twenty or fifty times bigger. Sometimes, too, we’d pass long stretches of riverbank where there wasn’t a town at all any more, and there would be the marks of an old town, all overgrown with trees or sticking out here and there in the middle of a pasture.

The two big towns we passed on the way down to Memfis, Yoree and Sanloo, made the point even harder to miss. Yoree’s a town of decent size, and Sanloo’s one of the dozen biggest cities in Meriga, but if you look at either one from the river you can see that they’re both tiny next to what they used to be. The main ruins in both of them got stripped down to the ground a long time ago, since they’re the kind of riverside towns that are where they are for a reason. Still, if you know what to look for, and any ruinman does, the lines of the old streets and what’s left of the foundations of old buildings go as far as you can see upriver and down.

Now and then, too, we’d come to a place where the ancients tossed a bridge right across the river; there would be big cracked shafts of concrete rising up from the water, and what was left of ramps going up on either side. Sometimes, when the road that used to run to the bridge still gets some use, I could see a ferryman’s house on one side or the other and a square-bowed boat tied up next to it, or scooting across the river like a water bug with the ferryman sculling for all he was worth at the stern. Still, more often than not what was left of the bridge would just be sitting there in among the trees and the water reeds with nothing else anywhere in sight, cracked and streaked with long red lines of rust, and only there because it wasn’t yet worth a ruinman’s time to get out there with a raft, crack the concrete open, and haul what was left of the rebar to a metal merchant. If the people on the Jennel Mornay had been the only people left alive anywhere on Mam Gaia’s round belly, I don’t think what was left of those bridges or the empty places that used to be towns could have looked any more lonely.

So that’s what I was thinking about as one day turned into another and the Jennel Mornay’s big stern wheel churned the green water into foam. Finally one evening we got to the place where the Ilanoy flows into the Misipi. It was just after dinner, which was bean soup, brown bread, and the cheap yellow beer they make up and down the Misipi Valley, which I hadn’t yet gotten used to then, and we’d eaten it the way all the cabin passengers on the Jennel Mornay ate every meal they got, which was sitting at long iron benches on either side of a long iron table running down the middle of the main cabin, with the thrum of the steam engines down below making the plates and mugs rattle loud enough that talking wasn’t too easy.

About the time I finished my soup, the whistle sounded up above us, three times, long and slow. Slane was eating with us, as he usually did, and looked up suddenly. “When you finish that,” he said, “you might want to step outside. There’s something worth seeing.”

I’d figured out already that what Slane didn’t know about traveling on riverboats wasn’t worth worrying about, so I downed the last of my beer and got to my feet. “Which side?”

“Right hand side’s the best.”

I guessed what he was talking about by then, and went outside the way he’d said. Berry was right behind me, since some things are even more interesting than a steam engine. It was as nice an evening as you could ask for, with puffs of clouds scattered over the sky like loms grazing in a field. The Ilanoy was good and wide by then; the land to the left—to port, I ought to say, since it was on a boat—was the same sort of thing we’d been passing for days, bluffs with wetland trees and water reeds all along their feet, but the land to starboard was low, with trees rising up just high enough that I couldn’t see past them to whatever was on the other side of them. Then the land to starboard wasn’t there any more; the Jennel Mornay’s whistle sounded again, three more times, and all of a sudden we were out on the Misipi.

I’ve never seen another river half so big. It was wider than a lot of lakes, with brown water rolling up out of the southwest just at that point—it bends a lot, and when the Misipi decides to bend, there’s not much that can argue with it. The far bank was a low line of green in the middle distance at first, and then we pulled away from the Ilanoy bank toward the deep water more or less in the middle. There were two more riverboats paddling south toward Sanloo within sight of us, and four of them paddling north, maybe headed all the way up to Meeyaplis. One of them whistled back to us, but there was more than enough river for everybody, and pretty soon they were out of sight to the north and we were passing others, steaming upstream past us as we steamed down.

After a while Berry said his goodbyes and scampered back down to the main deck, and a couple of other people who’d come out when the whistle sounded went back inside. I walked forward to the front of the cabin deck, where I could see the whole river in front of me and both banks off in the middle distance, and just stood there taking it in. Sanloo was another day or so downriver, Slane had told me earlier, and Memfis a few days further beyond that; I knew I needed to start thinking about what would happen once we got to Memfis—dealing with the local ruinmen’s guild, trying to find the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility, and if we were lucky, juggling all the details of running a dig, which I’d never done before by myself, much less with one of the most powerful jennels in Meriga looking over my shoulder and paying the bills—but that wasn’t what was on my mind just then. So I stood there at the rail and watched the river and the banks move past.

It was getting toward night before we got to the next town, which was Altan, over on the Ilanoy side. There were already lamps being lit there, so I could see it a good ways off, but the sky was still light enough that I could see something else: a line of concrete pilings like broken teeth, rising up out of the Misipi on either side. I blinked, looked again, and said some language hotter than I usually use; it hadn’t occurred to me that even the ancients would have put a bridge over a river that big.

“There were once dozens of those, as it happens,” Plummer’s voice said next to me.

I hadn’t heard him walk up, but somehow that didn’t surprise me. I glanced at him. “On the Misipi?”

“Exactly. All of them gone now, to be sure; the last were here and at Rocalan, and they were destroyed during the Third Civil War. A pity; I don’t imagine anything of the sort will ever be built again.”

“Does anyone even know any more how they were made?”

“There are books on the subject at Melumi and Sisnaddi, and a few other places.”

He was watching me with that same odd look, as though he was waiting for me to say something in particular, so I thought for a long moment before answering. There was more than that to make me pause, though, because Melumi’s got the Versty and Sisnaddi’s got the government archives, and I’d never heard about any other place with a collection of books worth noticing. He was, I suddenly guessed, trying to tell me something. What?

“If the books tell how it’s done,” I asked him, “why won’t a bridge like that ever be built again?”

Maybe it was the right thing to say. His voice went quiet, so that I had to strain to hear him. “Building a bridge is a simple thing for a nation that already has the factories, the machines, the steel, the fuel—especially the fuel. And it’s an obvious thing if there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cars, and people who want to drive the cars from one side of a river to the other side and back again every day. If the factories and the machines are gone, and the steel has to be cut by hand out of old buildings by your colleagues, and the fuel and the cars and most of the people are gone as well, it’s neither obvious nor simple. A bridge like this would cost every mark the government—” He said the word the old-fashioned way, rather than saying it “gummint” the way everyone else does nowadays. “—takes in taxes over ten years, and do no more good for anyone than a ferryman and his boat.”

I thought about a conversation we’d had earlier, on the way to Proo. “Well, but don’t they spend plenty of money on canals?”

“True. That takes men with shovels and men with trowels, earth and stone and mortar, and all of those can be had for a very modest sum these days. You know the price of steel, I believe. How much would it cost to bridge the river here with steel beams?”

I did know the price of steel, and even trying to guess the cost made my head hurt. “Okay,” I said. “That makes sense. And I guess there are books in Melumi and Sisnaddi and those other places that tell how to build canals, too.”

“Among other things,” Plummer said.

Right then I was sure I knew what he was trying to tell me. My thoughts set off running in half a dozen directions at once, but I managed to get them settled enough not to blurt out something like an idiot. “Maybe you can tell me this,” I said finally. “If nobody’s ever going to build a bridge like that again, what’s the value of the books that tell how it’s done?”

Plummer didn’t say anything for a long time, then: “When I was a boy, which was rather a few years ago, there was a book for children I read often, about a boy who made a little boat and put it in the river, hoping that it would travel all the way down to the sea. Did you ever read that?”

I was surprised enough that I turned to face him. The lamps of Altan were spots of light mirrored in his eyeglasses. “I used to love that book!”

“Did you ever make a little boat like the one in the story, and put it in the river?”

“Yes. I used to wonder what happened to it.”

“One never knows.” He turned away, looking out into the gathering dark on the river. “Knowledge is much the same. It comes down the stream of time to us, and perhaps turns up on the bank, and we can put it back in the water and send it on its way, or leave it on the bank to rot. The difference, of course, is that there is no sea: just a river flowing out of sight, and perhaps the chance that somewhere further downstream the little boat will be of use to someone, for reasons we will doubtless never know.”

He looked back toward me, then, and I could just see his smile in the last of the light. “An interesting subject to think about. We’ll talk more another time.” With that, he turned and went back into the cabin. I stared after him, and waited a long moment before following.

I didn’t sleep well that night, because I knew what he was talking about. There were stories and rumors I’d heard since I was small about people, maybe in Meriga, maybe somewhere else, who had knowledge from the old world that nobody else had any more. Half the robot stories my father used to tell me, and more than half the ones the prentices used to tell each other in Gray Garman’s house, had somebody mixed up in them who had an old book he wasn’t supposed to have, or something like that, and of course one part of the reason that ruinmen live outside the city walls and get uneasy looks from good folk is that a lot of people wonder if we know more than we ought to.

Now of course I knew that the right thing to do was to go talk to a priestess as soon as I had the chance and tell her what Plummer had said to me, and of course I knew that I wasn’t going to do anything of the kind. You don’t become a ruinman and dream about Deesee and go searching for Star’s Reach if you think everything from the old world ought to stay buried forever, and no doubt Plummer knew that perfectly well. Still, between wondering what Plummer and his nameless friends might be offering me, and wondering what they might ask from me in return, I had a hard time getting to sleep, and when I finally did, damn if I didn’t have a dream about Deesee like the ones I had when I was a boy: the vast empty streets and the water’s surface shimmering overhead as I hurried to meet somebody whose name I didn’t know at the base of the Spire.

I woke up before the sun came round Mam Gaia’s belly to shine on us. Berry was sound asleep and I didn’t wake him; I washed up quietly and got dressed and went to see if Plummer was awake yet. I went to the door to his cabin, and found it just a little open; when I nudged it a bit further, I could see at once that the cabin was empty and the bed hadn’t been slept in.

I admit I laughed, at myself as much as anything, guessing that he’d slipped off the boat as soon as it docked in Altan; I’d have done the same thing in his place, I realized right away, just in case I’d misjudged the person I’d talked to. I wondered how long it would be until he showed up again.

The empty cabin didn’t have any answers for me. After a moment I went aft to the kitchen, where they were boiling up a big pot of soup for breakfast, and begged an early cup of chicory brew.

Thirty-Two: A Different World

“There was a long argument about that in the old world,” said Eleen. We were supposedly eating lunch, but nobody was paying much attention to the bread and soup, and Tashel Ban wasn’t even pretending; he was over by the printer, muttering bits of hot language under his breath when the thing tried to jam.

“About numbers?” Berry asked.

“About math.” Scholars usually say “mathematics,” but Eleen stopped that about the second time one of us gave her a blank look. “One side used to say that math was universal, so every species would end up understanding it the same way. The other side said no, mathematics are just the way our brains work, and so every species would have its own math. In the old world, most scholars agreed with the first side, but the other side was right—at least about the Cetans.”

“But how did that stop them from figuring out what the Cetans were saying?” I asked.

“Because the first messages we sent them were all about numbers.” She rapped her knuckles on the table: once, twice, three times, five times, seven times. “What do those have in common?”

“They’re prime numbers,” Berry said at once. Eleen gave him a startled look, and he went on, as though he was embarrassed: “My teacher at Nashul Core taught us about those.”

“Good,” Eleen said. “Yes, and that’s one of the things they sent the Cetans, because they figured that any intelligent species ought to recognize them—but they didn’t. Meanwhile they were sending us the equivalent in their math, expecting us to recognize them, and we didn’t. It took a hundred years before anybody on either side realized that the problem was that we think in numbers and they don’t.”

I tried to get my thoughts to fit around that one. “They can’t even count on their fingers?”

“Cetans don’t have fingers.”

“Well, but—”

“But that’s just it. We’re born with so many fingers—five, most of us—and we live in a world where things come in nice neat packages you can count: four oranges, ten wild dogs trying to eat you, things like that. They don’t. If a Cetan wants to grab something—” Her hand mimed flowing outwards. “—it grows as many fingers as it needs, and when it doesn’t need them, they go away. Everything that matters to them is like that. That’s why their math starts from flows, not from numbers.

“We’ve got math that can handle flows; it’s called calculus, and there are maybe a hundred people in Meriga who can do it, but we’ve got it. They’ve got math that can handle numbers. It’s very advanced math to them—as far as anyone could figure out, they got there by imagining what happened when a flow got slower and slower, until it approached what we call zero—but they can do it. It took close to a hundred years for both sides to figure out that these complicated relationships they were finding in the other side’s signals were what the other side thought was very simple, basic, easy math.”

“Their technology is the same way,” Tashel Ban said, coming to the table with a stack of papers in his hands; the printer had finally given up jamming and done its job. “After the math issue got sorted out, the people here tried to explain to the Cetans how we build radios, and asked them how they did it.” He handed me my copy, and I glanced at the words on the top of the front page: BRIEFING PAPER 4: OVERVIEW OF CETAN MATHEMATICS AND TECHNOLOGY. “Turns out they mix up something the consistency of thick paint out of complex metal salts and start putting it down in layers on a base, sprinkling in other compounds here and there, and letting it dry a bit more or less as they go. When it’s done, it’s a solid mass that takes in radio waves and electricity, and puts out the magnetic fields they talk with, but nobody on this planet could figure out the details. The interesting thing is that they couldn’t make sense of our circuits either—the way we split up current into different resistors, capacitors, tubes, and so on doesn’t make any sense to them, and their math can’t follow it.”

“Can their radios,” Thu asked then, “do anything ours cannot?” Everyone else at the table looked at him. He hadn’t spoken yet in the discussion, because he didn’t need to; anything we found out about Cetan technology brought us closer to the choice between his alternative and Tashel Ban’s. That wasn’t a choice any of us wanted to make in a hurry, if we had to make it at all.

Tashel Ban answered after a moment. “Not that anything has mentioned. Electrons and radio waves work there the way they work here—at least, that’s the theory, and there’s nothing to suggest otherwise. It’s just the way they understand radio, and the math behind radio, that doesn’t make sense to us at all.”

“Nor should it,” Eleen said. “It’s a different world.”

That happened this afternoon, and I spent most of the rest of the day reading the paper she and Tashel Ban found somewhere hidden away in the computer. At this point I’ve read enough papers from the Star’s Reach project that I can follow them pretty well even when I don’t know what they’re talking about, and this was no different; I couldn’t tell you a thing about most of the technologies the paper mentioned, but there were two things that came through. One was that the Cetans can do pretty much the same sort of things that we can, but trying to figure out how is the sort of thing that makes scholars jump in the river and drown themselves.

The other thing was that the Cetans don’t seem to do the things that the old world did and we don’t do any more. The scholars who wrote the paper weren’t sure whether that’s because they hadn’t figured out how, or because there’s no way to do those on Tau Ceti II, or because Cetans have more common sense than human beings do, but the Cetans don’t seem to have cars or airplanes or anything like them, they get their electricity from sunlight and wind and water—well, gasoline, but there it’s the same thing—the way we do, and they aren’t lobbing any false stars up into the sky or building nukes or anything like that. Why is hard to say, because Eleen’s right; it’s a different world.

The funny thing is that the part of my story I want to tell next involved those same words, and it happened when we got to Proo. That’s where the Cago Canal ends and the Misipi Canal starts up toward Rocalan and the upper Misipi, and it’s also where the riverboats that work the Ilanoy River pick up passengers and freight for the run down to Sanloo and Memfis. We had two days in Proo, partly because there were fifty or sixty canal boats waiting to be unloaded there, and we had to wait our turn; and partly because the riverboat Plummer wanted to take hadn’t finished its run upriver. So Berry and I slept on the boat, visited the town, drank beer with the other boatmen, hauled and carried cargo once it came our turn, and generally got along fine.

The captain of our boat—no, I never did ask his name, or hear anybody else say it—waved me into the cabin after we’d finished loading up for the trip back to Cago. “You know,” he said, “you and that boy of yours did well. There’s not much to be made walking a mule down the towpath, but if you ever need someplace to lie low and stay fed the while, you could do worse.” With a motion of his head toward the foredeck: “You run with him, you’ll need to lie low now and then.”

He meant Plummer, of course. I would have given him a handful of marks just then to find out what he knew about Plummer, because I was already pretty sure that there was a lot more to the man than the traveling medicine seller he claimed to be, but something in the captain’s face told me that asking any questions was a bad idea and getting any answers wasn’t going to happen any time this side of forever. So I laughed and said, “I noticed that.” We talked a little more, about nothing in particular, and then I went back on deck and got to talking with some of the other boatmen about nothing in general.

That was the day before the Jennel Mornay got to Proo. That was the name of the riverboat Plummer wanted to take, and in case this ever gets read by somebody from the Neeonjin country , I should probably say that Jennel Mornay was a famous soldier on the Presden’s side in the Third Civil War. He was a tough old cavalryman with mustaches out to here, who fought his way downriver from Rocalan to Sanloo in the face of everything the Western Allegiancy could throw at him, which was a lot, and when he was done the final battle at Memfis was pretty much a foregone conclusion. I got to know his face on the trip down the river, because they had a big painting of him in the main cabin.

Still, that’s getting ahead of my story a bit. That morning, the morning the Jennel Morney came, we said our goodbyes to the canalboat captain and went with Plummer to the Proo levee where the riverboats docked. It wasn’t quite solid people from the water right up to the warehouses, but that’s because there was plenty of cargo too. There were three big packet boats already sitting with their noses to the levee, roustabouts loading and unloading barrels and sacks and crates, and passengers getting on or off their boats. Everybody was talking or yelling, the crew chiefs were blowing on their whistles loud enough to make their brains spray out their ears, steam was hissing from the boats and you could just hear, under it all, the churn-churn-churn of the big stern wheels keeping the bows pressed tight up against the shore.

Plummer pointed and said something neither Berry nor I could hear, but we both figured out at the same time that “follow me” was part of it. That meant heading through the middle of it all and most of the way out the other side, to the end of the levee where the warehouses were small and rundown and the roustabouts, who were mostly just sitting around, looked like they’d had a lot of better days. Finally Plummer stopped and so did we; the noise was still loud enough that we could barely hear each other, so we stood there and waited for a while until finally Plummer pointed again.

That’s when I first saw the Jennel Mornay, and after looking at the packet boats, well, let’s just say it was a bit of a disappointment. The plan was the same—one paddlewheel astern, one smokestack around the middle, boxy pilothouse on top of boxy cabin deck on top of boxy freight deck—but it was half the size and twice the age, and showed it. I didn’t know yet that most of the river trade runs on smaller boats like the Jennel Morney, and they don’t make enough money for the white paint and the big crews and all, but if you grow up in the Tenisi hill country and the only riverboats you ever hear about are the big white-painted ones with the fancy carvings all along the roof, let’s just say that a boat like the Jennel Mornay is not going to impress you, and leave it at that.

Still, we shouldered our bags and got in line dutifully behind Plummer, I paid our fare—you can work for your fare aboard a canal boat, but riverboats burn peanut oil and that doesn’t come cheap—and we crossed the landing stage, which I found out a few days later is what they call the ramp that gets swung over from the bow for passengers to board. A rickety stair led up from the freight deck to the cabin deck, where the purser looked at our tickets and waved us over to a couple of cabins over on the port side. They were cramped little rooms and I wouldn’t call them clean, but Berry and I slept in much worse on the long road from Shanuga to Proo, so we didn’t complain. We got our bags stowed and locked the cabin door and went back out to see whatever there was to see.

There were twenty cabins and maybe fifty people to fill them, and at least as many more who couldn’t afford cabin fare and would be sleeping all anyhow down on the freight deck, in among the barrels and sacks and wooden crates the roustabouts were hauling on board to replace what other roustabouts were hauling off. From the walkway that went all around the cabin deck, I could see most of Proo, the little bustling town near the water and the ruins reaching far back into the farm country behind it. The pilothouse of the nearest of the big white packet boats, which went up almost twice as far above the water as the Jennel Mornay, seemed to be looking down with the kind of raised eyebrow look a Circle elder gives a ruinman who’s made the mistake of crossing her path. After a few more minutes, the packet boat let out a whistle, the paddlewheel at the stern slowed, stopped, and then started turning the other way, pulling her stern first out into the river. It was a gorgeous sight, everything a Tenisi farm boy could hope for in a riverboat; it’s just that this particular Tenisi farm boy was on the wrong boat.

Still, when the last of our cargo was on board and the Jennel Mornay’s whistle sounded, it was still a sight to watch as we pulled away from the levee, backed out into the river, turned and started downstream. Ugly little thing though it was, the Jennel Mornay handled well, and before long we were churning down the river at a fair pace.

Plummer came out onto the walkway about the time Proo got lost behind a bend of the landscape behind us. “A pleasant day,” he said, “made even more pleasant by the number of kloms I would otherwise have had to walk. I hope the two of you find the boat agreeable?”

I wasn’t going to tell him that it looked like it got put together out of what was left over when the other boatbuilders had taken their pick. Still, he must have seen it in my face, and laughed his dry little laugh.

“There are advantages,” he said, “to a riverboat that doesn’t attract rich passengers. Even so, I trust that neither of you play cards or dice.”

“Not usually.”

“I recommend avoiding it altogether here. I’ve heard that someone once brought honest dice on board a Misipi riverboat, and the Misipi itself rose up and refused to let the boat pass until they were thrown overboard and replaced by the usual kind.”

A man standing against the rail near us heard this, and burst out laughing. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.” Then, turning: “Well, Mam Gaia’s bright green underthings! Plummer. Good to see you again.”

Plummer beamed. “Likewise. This,” he said to Berry and me, “is Slane, an old friend of mine. Slane, Trey and Berry are more recent friends. You’re headed to Memfis, I would guess.”

“Or wherever.” He looked me up and down, glanced at Berry, blinked, and looked again. “You?”

“I have business in Sanloo,” said Plummer. “These two? Memfis and points west.”

By then I’d taken as good a look at Slane as he’d taken at me. He had the sort of clothes that seem expensive but aren’t, and the sort of look that seems casual but isn’t; if he had dice in his pocket, and I guessed he did, the river probably wouldn’t rise up and stop the Jennel Mornay.

“Fair enough.” To Berry and me: “You two been to Memfis?”

“Not yet,” I told him.

He seemed to think that that was funny, and cuffed me on the shoulder. “Good. That’s good. You’ve heard of Dell, haven’t you? Memfis is Dell’s home town. Fact is, he’s a good friend of mine.” He laughed again. “You’re from, where, Joja or east Tenisi?”

“Shanuga,” I said, impressed despite myself.

“I rarely miss a voice. Well, Trey from Shanuga, the Misipi Valley’s a different world, and Memfis makes the rest of the Misipi Valley look like the Tenisi hills. It’s an easy place to get into trouble. Still, don’t you worry; you’re a friend of Plummer’s, you’re a friend of mine—and Dell’s.” Another laugh, and right then the whistle sounded up above the pilothouse—we were coming up on some little town, I forget the name of it, where the Jennel Mornay had a stop to make—and his laugh got caught up in the screech of the whistle and spread from one bank of the river to the other.

Thirty-One: Mule's Pace

I’d decided not to tell Plummer that Berry and I had someone following us, but we got to talking about the trip west from Troy, and the moment I mentioned the road we’d taken along the northern edge of Inyana he gave me one of his sidelong looks and said, “I take it you had unwelcome company.”

“More or less,” I admitted.

“Riders? I recall some difficulty with them on the road to Luwul.”

“No, just one man on foot.”

Plummer considered that for a moment. “If you would like to lose him, there might be a way. Still, all in good time. Where are you going next?” I told him, and he nodded once. “If the two of you have any interest in company on the trip, there might indeed be a way. Sanloo’s the next place I need to be.”

“How’s the medicine business?” Berry asked him then.

“Oh, prosperous as always. I’m pleased to report that the good folk of Hiyo and Inyana are less hostile to fine natural elixirs than their Tucki equivalents.” He sat back, glanced past me just for a moment, and then smiled. “We should talk about that later, however,” he said, and his hand moved: one finger on the edge of the table, and then four. “Tomorrow, perhaps?”

We said our goodnights, and he got up and went to the stairs out front. Berry and I finished our dinners and got up, and I made sure to turn around a little more quickly than usual. Sure enough, somebody was leaving through a door at the back of the common room, and I couldn’t be sure but it certainly looked like our black rider.

Up in our room, Berry and I looked at each other for a long moment. “The only question I’ve got,” Berry said finally, “is whether Plummer’s showed up by chance or not.”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I’m inclined to trust him, though I know that might be a big mistake.”

“I know.” Then: “But it probably wouldn’t hurt to have that conversation.”

We waited a while, until the hall outside our room was dead silent, and then I went to the door and opened it as casually as I could, as though I was headed to the washroom. No one was watching. One, four meant room fourteen, and that wasn’t too far away from our room; the trick was to make sure nobody realized both of us were going someplace, and that’s something every ruinman’s prentice knows how to do. Whenever two or three or half a dozen prentices want to go somewhere in their mister’s house where only one was supposed to go: you walk soft and match your footsteps to the others who are with you, so the mister and the senior prentices only hear one set of footsteps. Now of course they did the same thing when they were younger, so it’s a bit of a game; if you do it well enough to fool them, you can usually get away with whatever it is, even if they find out about it later on.

This was no game, but Berry and I both knew the way of it, and went down the hall right in step with each other, past Plummer’s door as far as the washroom, then went back to the door slow and soft as air so nobody would hear us. I tapped on the door—one, four—and a moment later Plummer opened it, beamed, and waved us silently in.

We made plans in a whisper; Plummer left the room to get the things we were going to need, and came back most of an hour later with a big cloth bag. Berry went to get our gear, making less noise than your ordinary mouse; the two of us changed our clothes, and then we climbed out Plummer’s window into the stableyard behind the inn and followed him into the night. After that most of what I remember was hurrying through dark alleys, trying to keep close to Plummer, as he led us on a zigzag path that seemed to go on for kloms and kloms.

Finally we stopped. I could see next to nothing but stars sparkling above us; the moon was down, and a dim light came from a little window in what looked like a low flat-roofed shack just ahead. Plummer whispered to Berry and me to wait, and then went to the shack and tapped on what must have been a door. The light vanished; I heard the door creak open and then shut again. In the silence that followed I heard an odd faint sound that finally turned into the murmur of moving water.

The door creaked again, and then Plummer was motioning us forward. I found my way through it by feel, and let myself be guided to a bench by someone I couldn’t see. Berry came through the door, black against the dim starlight, and then whoever it was pulled the door shut again. A moment later, light: a dim lamp in the middle of the ceiling, revealing a tidy little room with a stove in one corner, shelves and cupboards here and there, a table in the middle and a little window in each wall.

“Well,” said the fourth person in the little room, a stocky gray-haired man in rough work clothes. “You’ll do, no question. You’ve all eaten? Fair enough. Get some sleep while you can; we’ll be going at first light.” He made a gesture toward a low door like a hatch. I thanked him—I was pretty tired by then—and stooped to get through the door; on the other side was an even smaller room with four bunks, stacked two to a side, with a straw-filled mattress and a blanket on each. That was enough for me; I found a place for my gear, got settled in one of the bunks, and fell asleep right away.

When I woke up, it took me a long moment to remember why I was sleeping in clothes that weren’t ruinman’s leathers. About the time I got awake enough to figure that out, I noticed that there was a good bit of light coming in around the sides of the door, and remembered what the man had said about starting before the sun was up. The other three bunks were empty, and I wondered for a moment whether Berry and Plummer had somehow managed to leave me behind.

Then I noticed that the room was moving—rolling just a bit from side to side. I rubbed my eyes and laughed, and went to the door. The room on the other side was empty and the door to the outside was open, but that didn’t worry me; I could see the green bank of a canal sliding slowly past a few meedas from the door.

Outside the cabin, the sun was splashing its light down on the canalboat, the water of the canal, and the banks and farms to either side. The man who’d welcomed us last night was on the towpath up ahead, next to a gray mule who plodded along the way as patient as only mules can be; the towrope ran back from the mule’s collar to the front end of the boat—the bow, I should say; I learned that word and half a dozen other bits of boat talk over the days that followed. The cabin I’d taken for a shack the night before was right up near the aft end, a little stable for whichever mule wasn’t working was just behind the bow, and between them was the long low body of the boat, lined with hatches that let into the hold.

Plummer was sitting on the roof of the cabin when I came out, saw me, and slid down from his place with a grace you don’t expect from an old man. “Good morning!” he said. “If you’re considering food, there’s bread and soup in the kitchen—the galley, I should say—and some quite acceptable apples.”

I thanked him and said, “Where are we?”

“Our captain,” and he motioned with his head at the man beside the mule up ahead of us, “calls it the Calsag channel. If I gather correctly, it runs from Lake Mishga south of Cago out to the main Cago Canal west of here, which will take us to the Ilanoy River and the first steamboat south.”

“Good,” I said. “Thank you again—this is pretty clever.”

“Most people react to being followed by hurrying.” Plummer gestured ahead, to where the mule and the captain plodded slowly on. “Most people who follow others, if they lose their target, count on that, and hurry to catch up. Fall behind, and most of the time you won’t be found.”

Even though he was looking away from me, it felt like he was watching me as he said that. I had no idea why, or what he wanted me to say or not say. “You do that a lot?”

“Now and again.”

“I guess selling medicine’s a risky business.”

That got me a quick unreadable look back over his shoulder. “It can be.”

The conversation didn’t go anywhere else, so I went back inside and had some of the bread and soup and one of the apples, and washed up. Afterwards, I went out again just as we got to a lock. There was a line of canal boats waiting there, so we joined it, and sat there while two boats at a time went up and two more going the other way came down.

The captain came aft as soon as he’d gotten the mules settled in the stalls up front. “Morning,” he said. “You ever handle a mule?”

“You find me anybody from the Tenisi hills who didn’t,” I told him, “and I’ll buy you a drink.”

That got me a nod and the kind of quick half-smile one working man gives to another. “Fair enough. When we get going again, I’d like you to spell me; your boy hasn’t worked with mules, but he’s good on the rudder—and so’s our other passenger.”

I remembered just in time that Plummer’s friends didn’t use names. “Sure. Anything I ought to know?”

“Just keep Sal on the towpath and we’ll be fine.”

By the time we were in the lock, I’d gone forward, gotten introduced to Sal the mule, sorted out which of us was boss, and got her harnessed up. Once we were ready to move again, Sal and I headed down the towpath, and pretty quick she settled into the same steady plod as the other mule, whose name was Josey. I got to know both of them pretty well over the days that followed, because that’s how I paid my way down the Cago Canal. Night and day, the boat kept moving at mule speed, a couple of boatlengths behind the boat ahead and in front of the boat behind, and night and day the captain and I spelled each other, four hours on and four hours off.

The only breaks in that slow pace were when we lined up at a lock, on the one hand, and when we pulled into a wide place to load or unload something at one of the little towns that lined the canal, on the other. That was a break only in a manner of speaking, because it was me and Berry who did the loading and unloading, and none of it was particularly light. We hauled out kegs of nails and wood screws, crates of shovel and hoe and rake heads, all the metal parts and machinery for a wind turbine some farm family had saved up their marks to buy, and boxes that had stocky brown jugs of Genda whiskey in them; we replaced it all with barrels of apples, bottles of cider, and sacks of grain from Ilanoy farms. Still, what ruinmen haul on the job is no lighter.

All considered, it was a pretty good time, and the fact that I didn’t know the first thing about canal boats before I’d started the trip gave it a bit of interest, too. There aren’t a lot of canals down in Tenisi, but they’re all over the northern part of Meriga, from Neyork west all the way to the Misipi River. I asked Plummer about that once, when we were sitting on the roof of the cabin and Berry and the captain were doing their half of the work.

“The canals” They’re quite old,” he said. “They came before the old world, or what most people remember as the old world. Most of them were abandoned when fossil fuels came to power everything, and had to be dug out and fitted with locks again. That started after the Third Civil War, and it’s still going on; if I recall correctly, there are two canals being reopened in Hiyo as we speak.”

“That was generous of them,” I said. “The ancients, I mean.”

He glanced at me, took a long swig from his whiskey bottle. “As far as anyone knows, they never thought twice about it. They no longer needed the canals, and—” A shrug. “That was that.”

“No, I meant it. At least they dug the things out in the first place.”

“I suppose that’s—“ Plummer stopped halfway through the sentence, and a moment later I saw why. There were soldiers, a long line of them, crossing a big stone bridge up ahead of us. We got off the roof—you have to get down most times when a canal boat goes under a bridge—and watched the soldiers march past as we got closer to the bridge.

We were almost under it when the end of the line came past, and there was a captin on horseback right at the back. He glanced at us, looked up and down the boat, then looked straight at me. “You with the hat,” he said. (I was wearing one, a cheap straw hat I’d bought for a couple of coins in one of the little towns along the way.) “Care to make a better wage than you’re getting now? The jennel’s looking for soldiers.”

We had enough soldiers in Tenisi that I knew what to say. “Born with a bad foot, sir and captin. I can just about keep up with a mule.”

He considered that. “Too bad. If you have any friends who might be interested, tell them Jennel Tarl’s hiring, a hundred marks for signing even if they’ve never touched a gun before.”

“I’ll tell ‘em, sir and captin,” I said, and the man nodded and spurred his horse after the line of marching men.

The damp black shadows under the bridge slid over us then. After we came out the other side, I got back onto the roof of the cabin and looked over my shoulder. “I wonder what that was about.”

“Something we’ll see quite often in the next few years, I fear,” Plummer said. He drank more whiskey. “An aging Presden and no heir in sight is a recipe for trouble, and that means soldiers: for the loyal, for the ambitious, for those who simply hope to survive. And when she dies...”

He wasn’t looking at me that time, either, but I had the same feeling again as though he was watching me, seeing how I would react. I didn’t have the least idea what to say, and I didn’t really want to say much of anything, either. What Plummer had said a bit earlier about the Third Civil War suddenly made me notice that my time was a lot better than fifty or a hundred years ago or, well, pretty much any time since the old world started to come crashing down; not that far back, there hadn’t been long lines of canal boats moving iron and apples and grain from one side of Meriga to the other, and for that matter there hadn’t been enough iron and apples and grain, or much of anything else, for a lot of people all through that time. When Sheren died and left the Presden’s office for others to fight over, I wondered, would it be back to that? I didn’t want to think about it just then, but the idea was hard to chase from my mind. As I write all this, here at Star’s Reach, it still is.

Thirty: The Face Beneath The Hood

It took Berry and I a couple of weeks, as I said, to finish going through the records from the Skeega ruinmen. Every couple of days we found something or other that mentioned the White River Transport Facility, but it wasn’t until we’d read most of what was at Troy Tower that we got the records from the seasons when the Skeega ruinmen worked on it.

It was late in the afternoon, and I’d spent nearly the whole day reading the dullest kind of report a ruinman can file with the guild: here’s where it was, here’s when we worked on it, and all we found was concrete we cracked to get the iron bars inside. That’s what you find more often than not in the ruins of small towns and suburbs, because a lot of people kept living in those straight through the end of the old world; the small towns stayed small towns and bits and pieces of the suburbs turned into small towns themselves, and the people who lived there stripped old buildings for anything they could use long before ruinmen got around to the job. So that’s what I’d been reading, one report after another from the small towns near Skeega, and then I pulled out another stack and nearly dropped it, because it said WHITE RIVER TRANSPORT FACILITY right across the top.

That was the most exciting thing about that stack of paper, though. The place was a truck depot in the years before the Second Civil War, when there were lots of little rebellions catching fire here and there across the middle of the country and there weren’t enough soldiers or fuel to stamp on all of them. That’s all it was: lots of trucks, big round fuel tanks to keep them fed, and a bunch of long low bulletproof buildings for the clerks who managed the trucks and the soldiers who guarded the fuel. Most of it burned toward the end of the Second Civil War, and it was abandoned and used by squatters afterwards, so the papers that might have sent us on our way were long gone. The ruinmen who dug the place up found a whole mess of buried pipes, and made a lot of money selling the metal, but that didn’t do Berry and me any good.

After we’d finished reading all of it, we sat there for a little while, and neither one of us said a thing. “Okay,” I said finally. “I guess we go to Memfis, then.”

Berry grinned. “I was hoping.”

I thought about routes for a bit, and added up the money I had. It would be a long walk, unless—

“You know,” I said then, “if we go from here to Cago, we could do part of it a lot faster by boat.”

His eyebrows went up. “And from Cago?”

“Across to the Misipi, and down by riverboat from there.”

That got me an open mouth, and then another grin. “I always wanted to ride a riverboat someday.”

“Get ready,” I told him. “We can get out of here tomorrow, and get to the Misipi in a couple of weeks.”

That’s pretty much what we did, too. We said our goodbyes to the old ruinmen who lived at Troy Tower at dinner that night, shared another glass of Gendan whiskey with Tashel Ban that night, got up before the sun did and headed west down the Skeega road.

We weren’t quite alone on the road, but it seemed close to that sometimes. The lake schooners go around the north end of Mishga from Troy to Cago, and when the winds are good it’s at least as fast as walking there and a lot more comfortable; all the cargo goes by boat, too, because it’s that much cheaper and safer than loading it on a wagon and hoping for the best. So most of what you get on the Mishga roads are farmers heading to and from market, with the occasional player or elwus going from town to town just to add a bit of color to it all. That made for less trouble finding places to stay the night, and it was also the reason we figured out that we were being followed.

That happened just west of Isselannee. We took the wrong fork of the road there, and got most of the way to Anarba before we had the chance to ask a local farmer for directions and found out that we’d made a mistake. That meant a couple of hours on rough farm roads going south, but we finally made it back to the straight road to Cago and got to a little town, a place called Leen, just before sunset. Leen has all of one place where travelers can spend the night, a big farmhouse that’s probably going to give it up and become an inn in a few more years. It’s already got a big sign out front, and the front room and dining room have been knocked together into a space big enough to feed a pretty large party; it’s just a matter of time before the tavern goes in and the fields get sold or leased to somebody else.

I hired Berry and I a room there, we got the road dust off us, and then we went down to the big room out front and saw about some dinner. The place was still enough of a farmhouse to cook up a meal that would make a fieldhand comfortable after a long harvest day, and so the two of us were sitting back and feeling very full when the door banged open and a man came in: just a plain traveler in dusty clothes, with the kind of bland ordinary face you’d have a hard time remembering from one day to the next. The woman who ran the place went over to him, and I could hear about every third word as he hired a room and got a meal ordered. All the while he was talking to her, though, he kept looking past her, across the room, at Berry and me.

That’s when I realized that I’d seen his face before, though I couldn’t remember where. He might have noticed that I was watching him, because he stopped looking at me, and then a minute or two later he was on his way up the stairs to his room. The woman who ran the farmhouse went back to the kitchen. I turned to Berry, and his face had that blank look he gets when he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s noticed something.

“Sir and Mister,” he said very quietly. By that time, as I think I mentioned earlier, he only used my title for other people’s benefit, or for a joke, or when he wanted to say something important.

I figured I knew this time which it was. “The man who just came in.”

A quick nod. “He’s following us. We passed him on the road to Anarba today.”

I considered that for a long moment, and coukdn’t think of any good reason why somebody else would make the same double-back we did, and end up at the same place. I nodded and said, “We can talk in a bit,” and he nodded back and put his attention into finishing up the last of his dinner.

Once we got up to our room and the door was locked, Berry said, “I don’t think he was following us before Troy, but I can’t say for sure.”

“The roads from Melumi were pretty crowded, but I don’t think I saw him,” I said.

“If he wasn’t—” He didn’t go on, but I knew what he was thinking. The roads in Meriga are about as safe these days as they’ve been since the end of the old world, but every so often you hear of someone with valuables being robbed or worse, and noticing that you’re being trailed by some member of a gang who simply makes sure you’re where they want you to be is supposed to be one of the few warnings you’re likely to get.

All of a sudden, I thought of the riders who had followed us north to Luwul—the Black Riders, we’d called them, after the characters in the stories about Freddy and Sam. I’d wondered when I was a child what kind of a face the Black Riders had beneath their hoods. I don’t think I ever thought back then that it might be a bland, forgettable face, but as I thought about it there in the farmhouse in Leen, the idea was hard to shake.

“Then we’ll dodge Black Riders again,” I said, and got a grin and a laugh from Berry.

We didn’t travel by night this time, though. The southern part of Mishga is too settled for that; it’s not like Tucki, where you’ve got plenty of forest between one farm and another and so plenty of places to hide during the day. Instead, we left the farmhouse early the next morning, without seeing our Black Rider, and got in among a bunch of farmers from the little towns nearby who were on their way to the market at another small town whose name I forget that was twenty kloms or so down the road. We stuck with them right to the market town, and didn’t leave the town the next morning until we’d found another group of travelers who were going the way we were.

That’s more or less how we traveled all the way to Cago. The first few days we didn’t see any trace of the man we’d spotted at Leen, and I’d just about begun to wonder whether the whole thing was a mistake, when Berry caught sight of him on the edge of the crowd at the market at Jonsul, and let me know where to look. He was turning away by the time I found him, but it was the same man, I was certain of that.

We caught sight of him again every two or three days from there to Cago. Once we got near the Inyana border, just to be sure, we veered off on a side road when we were sure no one was looking and crossed down to another road running the same way across the very northern edge of Inyana. Sure enough, by the time we got to Sowben, there he was again, looking down from a window as we got into town at the end of a long day walking alongside a wagonload of metal from an old airport outside of Elcart that the ruinmen there had sold to a local metal merchant.

By that time we were close enough to Cago that there wasn’t much point in making any more detours. Berry and I kept on the Inyana road, staying with the metal merchant’s wagon and talking shop with him and his prentices, partly because there’s safety in numbers and partly because they were good company and it was pleasant to spend time with people who knew most of the same things we did and shared in another part of the same work. Still, that meant that our Black Rider had no trouble at all keeping track of us. We spotted him a couple of times in the days that followed, never more than a glimpse here and there; to this day I don’t know if he hadn’t realized that we were onto him, or if he knew it, and showed himself to us now and then just to keep us on our toes. We kept waiting for a gang to show up, but none ever did.

Finally one morning we got to the edge of the Cago ruins, and the road veered south a bit to stay clear of them. Cago was a big city in the old world, the biggest still above water anwhere in Meriga, and even though ruinmen had been digging into the ruins there about as long as they’d been busy anywhere but Troy, there are still plenty of buildings and a few of the old towers standing there, following the curve of Lake Mishga for kloms and kloms. It’s the only place I know where you can get an idea of what the drowned cities of the coast must have been like before the seas rose, just ruin after ruin as far as your eyes will reach.

Most places in Meriga, the roads stay as far away from the ruins as they can, but east of Cago you don’t have much choice unless you want to go deep into Ilanoy farm country. The road there runs practically right up under the ruins, and Berry and I and the metal merchant and his prentices had a fine time talking about the buildings we passed and what the local ruinmen found the last season and all, while most of the other people on the road hurried along and gave the ruins nervous looks over their shoulders, as though they thought a robot or something was about to come lurching out from between two heaps of brick that used to be factories and butter all of us across the pavement.

We walked most of a day alongside those ruins, and weren’t to Cago yet by the time the sun went down. There was a town called Monster right alongside the road where we were when things started getting dark; the metal merchant had friends in the business a little further on and wanted to get to their place that night, but Berry and I were tired, and so we said our goodbyes and went to find a place to stay in Monster. There was only one, a big comfortable inn, and it still had rooms to hire, so I handed over some coins and we did the usual, upstairs to our room to wash off the road dust, downstairs to the big room to get a meal. The room was a cramped little place without a window and the food was not half so good as what we’d been getting in Inyana farmhouses along the road, but I didn’t mind; I was tired, and wouldn’t have minded a bit of bread and bean soup and a place to sleep on the ground.

We’d gotten there later than most, and the common room was mostly empty when we got there. We sat down and called for our dinners, and I was about halfway through mine when all at once Berry nudged me hard in the side with one of his elbows. I tried not to let anything show on my face, which wasn’t too easy, since Berry has sharp elbows; still, nobody seemed to have noticed when I looked up from my food and gave the room a lazy glance. I expected to see our Black Rider, and didn’t. It took a moment before I realized that the only face in the room that was turned toward me was one I recognized, and a good long moment after that before I could put a name to it.

By then he had seen me as well, and came over to the table where Berry and I were sitting: an old man, lean and stooped, with just a trace of white hair around his ears and eyeglasses as round as moons. “A very good evening to you both,” he said. “I hope you won’t mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” I told him, and waved at a chair. “It’s a long way from the road to Luwul, Plummer.”

That got me a smile I couldn’t read at all. “True indeed,” he said, and sat down across the table from me. “A very long way.”

Twenty-Nine: The Other Side of the Stars

It’s been close to a week now since I last wrote down any of my story. That wasn’t because anything big happened, mind you. Tashel Ban and Eleen are still spending most of their waking hours trying to talk the computer into handing over everything it’s got about Tau Ceti II and the Cetans, and the rest of us are taking turns cooking and washing, running paper up from the bins on the deep levels, and then every so often running over to the computer and staring at some file they’ve gotten readable.

No, what happened was that I got distracted. I’ve mentioned more than once that I’ve been keeping busy spraying resin on the old world books about aliens we found here, one page at a time, and reading them pretty much for lack of anything better to do. The day after I wrote down what I remember about Tashel Ban’s story, I pulled down the last book on the top shelf. I’d left it for last, since it’s about three fingers thick and all the paper’s gone brown as Misipi water and frail as a bug’s wing. What I didn’t know until I cut the binding loose and went to work on it was that it wasn’t an alien-book like the others; it was a story.

More exactly, it was a mother of a story, a mother with babies and then some. I forgot that I was supposed to be spraying the pages so many times that I finally just gave up and read the whole thing through to the end, then read it again when I went back through to spray the pages I hadn’t done yet. Once I was done I showed it to Eleen, and her eyes went round; she’d heard of it, most scholars in her field have, but everybody thought all the copies had gotten lost around the time the old world ended. That happened to a fair number of books, and especially stories like this one. They were a particular kind of make-believe story set off in space somewhere, and not many people wanted to read about that any more when the old world was grinding to a halt.

Nowadays I think a lot of people would like it. For all that it’s set in space, you can just change a couple of words here and there, and anybody in Meriga with the brains Mam Gaia gave geese ought to be able to figure out what’s going on right away. The hero’s the son of a jennel, or close enough that the difference doesn’t matter, and there’s a bitter quarrel going back a long way between his father and one of the other jennels. So the other jennel, who’s got the morals of a Jinya pirate, works up a plot to get the presden to send our hero and his father and mother and their servants off to the deserts out west—well, of course it’s some other planet on the other side of the stars, but it might as well have been Kansiddi—where they can be ambushed and killed by the other jennel’s men and the Presden’s soldiers. Our hero and his mother get away into the desert, though, and meet up with the desert tribes the way we did a couple of days west of Kansiddi, and the story goes on from there. Of course the desert tribes here in Meriga ride horses instead of big worms, but it’s a make-believe story and you’ve got to make allowances for that.

Eleen’s reading it now. She probably ought to be sleeping instead, but that’s her call; in a little while she’ll doze off over the book and then I’ll get her tucked in and sleeping. I’d meant to write about how Berry and I left Troy and went to Skeega, and how we found out we were still being hunted, but just now my head is still too full of sandstorms and knife duels for that: too full of those, really, and something else besides.

This afternoon I finished reading the story the second time through, got all the pages coated with resin front and back, and tied them up in a bundle once they were dry. All the alien-books I’d treated and read were back in the room where I’d found them, bundled and stacked in a spare box I’d found; so they’ll be in good order when it’s time to pack them for the trip to Melumi. I didn’t put the story in the box, since Eleen wanted to read it, but I wandered into the room anyway and looked at the shelves full of books that were left, reading what I could off the spines. I thought I might be able to find another story, or at least something besides another alien-book. Before I got very far, though, I heard somebody moving in the hallway behind me, and looked back over my shoulder.

It was Anna. I said something friendly, I forget what, but she just looked at me for a long time, and then came a step or two into the room. “You’ve been saving those,” she said.

I nodded.

“Have you read any of them?”

“All I’ve treated so far.” I gestured at the box.

“What do you think of them?”

I wasn’t at all sure what to say to that, and her face gave me no clue; the wrinkles around her eyes might as well have been a mask. “I don’t know what to think,” I said finally.

She tilted her head and gave me one of her sidewise glances. “Good,” she said. “That’s a useful habit.” Then, after a moment: “May I tell you a secret? You’ll need to promise not to tell it to anyone else, though.”

That was tempting enough that I nodded. “Ruinman’s bond.”

Anna smiled, an odd slight smile I couldn’t read at all. “The secret is this: those books are the reason Star’s Reach is here. Well, part of the reason, but a very important part.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Will you tell me what the reason is?”

Her smile tightened, and I couldn’t read that either. “Keep reading, and you’ll find it,” she said. A moment later she was out of the room, and I heard her footsteps whisper away down the hall.

I stood there and looked at the door for a good long moment, and then shook my head and turned back to the books on the shelf. Despite what she said, I was still hoping to find a story instead of another alien-book, or maybe something else that would explain what she was talking about. It occurred to me that she might have meant that there was one book, or a couple of books, hidden in among the alien-books and the stories, that explained something or other about Star’s Reach or Tau Ceti II. So I pulled out a dozen books one at a time and flipped through a few pages of each, and every single one of them turned out to be an alien-book.

It doesn’t take more than a quick glance at a few pages to figure that out. You start reading and pretty soon you find something about aliens kidnapping people and doing things to them, or about a place called Roswell, or another place called Area 51, or—well, there are about a dozen things in all. It’s always those same things, and how the government’s trying to hide them, and sometime really soon the government will fess up or the aliens will land and then we’ll all know the truth. There’s never anything about gasoline oceans and rotten-egg skies, or creatures with a free-swimming ocean phase and an intelligent communal phase on land, and nothing we’ve learned about the Cetans makes me think they fly around in spaceships shaped like dishes, or that they got off their world at all, the way a few of us did for a little while back in the old world.

Still, wishing wasn’t going to turn the alien-books into stories about desert planets or anything else, so I took one back into the room Eleen and I share, cut the pages loose from the spine, and got to work. I could hear Tashel Ban pounding at the computer keyboard at the other end of the hall—he always sounds as though he’s attacking the keys, where Eleen types soft and quick so you can hardly hear her at all—and someone, probably Berry, busy in the kitchen. I tried to pay attention to what the book said, but mostly I sat there and sprayed pages with resin and thought about Anna.

She was the last one to join us on the journey out to Star’s Reach, and we didn’t even know she existed until we got to Kansiddi. That seems like a long time ago, though it was only a few months. We’d left Sanloo the day after Jennel Cobey and his man Banyon showed up, heading pretty close to due west on the army road from the Misipi to the Suri River. That’s a road that reminds you every step of the way that you’re nearing the borders of Meriga. You come up out of the Misipi valley where it’s all green and full of trees, like most of Meriga is, and the trees start thinning out as the land gets dry. Day by day, as we walked west and the pack ponies the jennel brought trudged along with us, the land dried out and the wind picked up. It was as if we were walking back in time, going back to before the rains came and saved Meriga from the long drought.

Finally you’re in desert, and then a while after that you come to Kansiddi. There’s a big fort there full of soldiers, since the desert tribes like to cross the Suri and go raiding for horses when they can, and the Meycan Empire has outposts off to the south, far but not far enough. Other than the fort, the stores and taverns and harlots and all that cater to the soldiers, and some merchants who aren’t supposed to trade with the desert tribes but do anyway, there’s not much to Kansiddi, just low brown buildings and dust and the Suri River itself, which is a mass of brown water and floating junk when the rains come and a long streak of mud and pools and mosquitoes the rest of the year. It really did come to mind when I was reading about the town on that desert world in the story I mentioned.

I’d have worried about getting through Kansiddi in one piece if we hadn’t had a jennel with us. As it was, all the soldiers took one look at Jennel Cobey and jumped as though Tashel Ban had wired their whatnots to a battery and thrown the switch. We went to the fort and talked to the cunnel there—well, mostly the jennel talked—and then we rented rooms in one of the two decent places in town. Other than a visit to the ruinmen’s guild hall Berry and I made the next day, we stayed right there at the tavern while the jennel’s man got the guides and gifts we’d need to cross part of the desert and not get our throats cut by the tribespeople. So there we were, even more keyed up than we were in Sanloo, and one evening I went down to get a tall glass of whiskey from the bar when I heard something like an argument out by the front door.

Even though it was one of the two best places in town, they had fights in the bar pretty much every night we were there, and I don’t mean people yelling at each other for a bit; they hauled a corpse out the first night we were there, after some soldiers got into it over a card game and were too drunk to take it to the circle the way they should have. So I didn’t pay much attention to the voices I heard out front, until I got close enough to realize that it was one of the big toughs they keep to guard the door telling someone else that they weren’t going to bother the jennel or the ruinman or any of those people. That meant us, and I was bored and curious enough to go over and see who it was.

So I crossed the bar from the stair to a place where I thought I could see the front door without being spotted, ducking around the tables and a few puddles of beer the barmaids hadn’t mopped up yet. About the time I got close enough to see that the other person was an old woman with a spray of white hair like feathers on the head of an eagle, though, she looked past the tough and in a voice I could have heard half a klom away said, “Ruinman, you’re trying to get to Star’s Reach. I was born there.”

The tough stopped in the middle of a sentence, and then started laughing, a big rumbling good-natured laugh, the kind you don’t expect to hear from somebody who makes his living knocking spare teeth out of unruly drunks. I walked over to the door, looked at her, and said, “Prove it.”

“I can’t, of course,” she said. “But there are locks there that only open to a fingerprint.” She held up one finger. “If they still work, they’ll recognize this.”

That caught my attention right away. The ancients had locks like that, and you find them in ruins now and again; of course there’s no way to get them open except with a pry bar, or maybe a barrel of gunpowder, because whatever fingers were supposed to open them have been topsoil for more than four centuries now. The thing is, next to nobody outside the ruinmen’s guild knows about them, the same way that next to nobody but ruinmen know about the kind of trap that almost killed me the day we found the letter about Star’s Reach. She might have found out about them some other way, but it made her story a little less unbelievable than I thought it was at first.

The tough turned to me. “Sir and Mister,” he said, “This woman, she’s old Anna, who does laundry and sewing for some of the officers up at the fort. If she’s from Star’s Reach, I’m the Presden’s one and only virgin daughter.”

That got me laughing, too. “Tell you what,” I said. “Upstairs there’s a scholar from Melumi who knows everything anybody knows about Star’s Reach. If this Anna’s lying, we’ll know right away, and you can chuck her out the door once we chuck her down the stair.” I turned to Anna, who looked at me with her head tilted just a little and a look on her face that might have meant anything. “And if you are lying, you probably want to turn right around and leave now.”

“I’ll gladly talk to your scholar,” she said, without a bit of hesitation in her voice. The tough shrugged and stepped out of the way, I motioned with my head, and Anna and I crossed the bar and went up to our rooms.

Everybody was there in the common room we’d rented except Banyon, who was still out getting guides, and every eye in the place turned toward us the moment they realized there was somebody else with me. “This is Anna,” I said by way of explanation. “She’s made a pretty remarkable claim.”

“What the ruinman means,” she said at once, “is that I was born at Star’s Reach. I hear you’re trying to get there.”

That got a moment’s dead silence. Jennel Cobey glanced from me to Anna to Eleen and back to me; the others looked at each other; Eleen looked straight at Anna and said, “That’s quite a remarkable claim. Would you care to say more about it?”

“My mother,” said Anna, “was a linguistic analyst, and my father was a software engineer. Both of them were E-6 technical specialists.”

Eleen’s eyebrows went up, so I knew the words meant something. “And you?”

“I was five years old when we left. We and a dozen others were the last ones to leave; that’s what my parents told me.”

“Can you lead us there?” This from the jennel.

“I don’t know,” Anna said. “It was a long time ago.” Then she explained about the fingerprint locks, and I explained that that was why I’d brought her up, and then everybody started talking at once, asking questions and then not waiting for the answers, until finally I held up both hands and we got down to some serious talk.

That was how Anna joined us. There was still a lot we didn’t know about her then, and I wonder if there’s still a lot we don’t know about her even now. Or maybe just one thing: she knows something we don’t, or thinks she does, about Star’s Reach, why it’s here and why we’re here. If that’s hidden in the alien-book I sprayed and read and tied up in a bundle this afternoon, I didn’t find it; there were just more of the same stories about a place called Roswell and flying saucers and how sometime very, very soon the saucers were going to land and prove all the doubters wrong. Maybe it’s something obvious, but even so, it might as well be on the other side of the stars from me.

Twenty-Eight: Tashel Ban’s Story

“To start with,” said Tashel Ban, “it might help if I told you my right name is Dashiell Hammett Vanderlin, thirty-first of the name. Not that I go by that outside of Nuwinga, and only there with the right people, if you know what I mean.”

Berry’s eyebrows had gone way up at the name, and that and what little I’d heard about Nuwinga gave me a pretty good guess. I sipped whiskey and said, “Well enough to wonder what somebody with a name like that is doing digging up radio plans over here in Troy.”

He grinned. “Three older brothers, and every one of them has pupped their own brats. I don’t use that last word lightly, either.” He laughed, and so did Berry and I. “I could have gone to sea, or I could have settled down on our estates near Ammers and done the gentleman farmer, or I could have gone up to Lebnan to mix with the politicians and drink myself to death like my uncle Raymun.” A shrug. “None of those appealed much. So I went to Rutlen instead. That’s where we have our Versty, the way you have yours down at Melumi.”

This time it was my eyebrows that went up. “You’re short a couple of things that you’d have to have to get into Melumi.”

“True. In Rutlen, though, they let men in to study, if they’re of good enough family and pay more than I want to think about.”

I nodded and took another sip. Outside the window of the little room where we were sitting, the night was closing in.

“The thing is,” said Tashel Ban, “the Vanderlins have a habit of pupping oddities now and then. My great-great-aunt Aggie was a sea captain, one of the best, and sailors who wouldn’t take ship if there was any other woman on board would kill for a berth on the Flying Gull—that was her ship.”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Berry.

That got him a glance. “A lot of people have. Broke up on the rocks somewhere along Genda’s north coast long before I came along, though of course the family has another by the same name now. But Agatha was one of our oddities. We had another who crossed over to the Arab countries, took up their religion, and tried to bring it back with him.” A little sharp shake of the man’s head; I gathered that the project didn’t go well. “We had another who took it in his head to go west to the Neeonjin country—I don’t think anyone knows to this day what happened to him.

“And then there’s me. I took an interest in radio, early on, though that’s not the sort of thing a gentleman’s son does in Nuwinga. Here in Meriga, you’ve got a radioman’s guild, as I recall.”

I didn’t know much about them, since that wasn’t one of the guilds that has to build its hall outside city walls, along with the ruinmen, the burners, and the other crafts nobody likes to be around. In Shanuga the radiomen’s hall is right in the middle of town, tall and narrow like a rich family’s house, and it’s got a whole forest of antennas up above the roof so the radiomen can talk to people all over Meriga. Still, guilds are guilds; the radiomen have their misters and prentices, and they’re just as closemouthed about their guild secrets as we are about ours.

I nodded, and Tashel Ban went on. “We don’t in Nuwinga, or not quite. With us it’s a government thing. You pass tests and get licenses; there are different tests and different licenses, and the top of them all is master radioman, which has a test they haven’t changed since before the old world ended. Last I heard there are a hundred twenty-six people in Nuwinga who’ve passed that test, and I’m one of them.” He sipped some whiskey. “And I passed it when I was fifteen years old.”

“So you’re good,” I said.

“Yes, but that’s not the point. What do you do when you’ve decided to put your life into radio work, and you get the thing most radiomen spend their lives trying to get before you’re old enough to grow a beard?”

That interested me. “You tell me.”

“I haven’t the least idea what anybody else would do,” Tashel Ban admitted. “Me, I decided that I was going to find out things that not even the master radiomen know, things that got lost when the old world went down. There’s a lot that nobody knows about radio any more, and I don’t just mean how they made chips—you know about those?”

I did. When you’re salvaging an old building that wasn’t looted too thoroughly during the last years of the old world, you’re almost certain to find electronics of one kind or another, computers or radios or other things that nobody even has a name for these days. Unless they were old when the old world ended, or made in the troubled years right before everything stopped, what’s inside is mostly pieces of stiff plastic studded with electronic things of various kinds, about half of them like square black centipedes with lots of metal legs. Those are chips. Most of them don’t work any more, and some of the ones that work are so complicated that not even the radiomen can figure out what to do with them, but if you get some that work you’re in luck, because nobody can make them any more and the radiomen will pay good money for them. “I’ve salvaged a fair number of them,” I said.

“So I’d guess. But there were ways of doing things, back before chips were invented, that could probably be done today if anybody knew how. Not just vacuum tubes—we make those, and I think you make them here in Meriga too, though there again there are a lot of tricks that have to be learned over again. There are layers up in the air that radio waves bounce off of, and they used to use those to talk to people on the other side of Mam Gaia; the layers aren’t the same as they were in the old world, and nobody’s sure why, but if we could figure out how the layers work now we could stay in touch with ships no matter how far away they sail; we could find out what’s happening in places nobody from Nuwinga or Meriga have been for four hundred years—plenty of other things, too.”

“I wonder, Sir and Mister,” said Berry then, “if it might turn out better for everyone if some of those things stay lost.”

Tashel Ban turned and gave him a good long look. “That’s something I think about,” he said after a while. “Along with the other master radiomen. Where do you cross the line between the technologies that help people and don’t hurt Mam Gaia, and the technologies that might lead us back down the road to the same mistakes the old world made? I don’t know the answer. I do know that radio’s a way to help people talk to each other when they can’t get close enough for voices to carry, and getting people to talk is a good thing much more often than not. So I’m guessing that figuring out more ways for people to talk over longer distances isn’t going to cross that line.”

Maybe it was the whiskey, but my mind jumped all at once from there to the thing I was looking for. “And if we’re talking about the distance between one star and another, do you think it’s the same?”

Tashel Ban was silent for a long moment. “I think so.” he said finally. “The same, and even more so. If it’s true—if they actually did get radio messages from somebody living on a world around some other star, whether they figured out how to read the messages or not—just knowing that there’s someone else out there, that we’re not all alone in all of the universe, sitting here on Mam Gaia’s belly in the middle of a great big dead emptiness where nobody anywhere else will ever think a thought or follow a dream or figure out something about the way the universe works, well, right there that’s something. And if there’s anything more, there again, it’s hard to think of a way that talking can hurt us.”

He downed another swallow of the whiskey. “But I’d give pretty much anything you care to name to be there when Star’s Reach gets found, if it ever does. It’s been well over thirty years since I passed my master radioman’s test, and I’ve found a few things and learned a few things since then, but I’d like to do one more thing on the grand scale, and helping find Star’s Reach would count. If you’ll have me, that is. I know this is a ruinman’s thing, and it’s also yours, if I’ve heard right.”

I nodded. “I’m not going to make any promises,” I said, “but I’ll keep that in mind.”

He considered that, nodded. “Fair enough.”

“The one thing I’m not sure of is how to find you, if it turns out all this leads anywhere.”

He gave me one of his owlish looks again. “That’s not hard. Get a letter to the Nuwingan embassy in Sisnaddi and they’ll have it to me soon enough; they know where I am.” Then, with an odd little smile: “I mentioned my uncle Raymun, didn’t I? The one who drank himself to death? He was presden of Nuwinga when he did most of the drinking. Our presdens don’t all come from one family the way yours does, but the job doesn’t stray too far, and I’ve had better than a dozen ancestors in the Gray House.”

We talked for a while longer, though I don’t remember about what, since I’d had a fair bit of Gendan whiskey by then, and then stumbled back to our room—well, I stumbled, at least, since Berry hadn’t had more than a few sips of the whiskey. When we got back to our room and the door was closed, I sat down on my bed and asked Berry, “What do you think of him?”

He was a prentice and I was a mister of the ruinmen’s guild, but by then he didn’t bother with the sir-and-mister business unless there was someone around who needed to be impressed by it, and I’d have laughed if he did it. “I’m not sure,” he said. “He’s likable enough, and I think he can be trusted, but I’d worry about what would happen if there’s a lot of the wrong kind of technology at Star’s Reach. He might not just stand by while we scrapped it.”

“If we get there,” I reminded him.

He grinned. “If we get there. I have to keep telling myself that.”

That night seems long ago and far away now, as I sit here in Star’s Reach and write these words that maybe nobody will ever read, and look up now and again to see Eleen asleep in our bed, after another hard day trying to get an old computer to give us the secrets of a world so far away it takes light more than ten years to get here from there. I’ve got my own printout of the briefing paper in front of me right now, setting out what the people here knew about the Cetans and their world two hundred years ago. I read it twice straight through when Tashel Ban finally got copies printed for all of us, and part of me just wants to keep reading it over and over again, until the hazy orange skies and brown oceans and the Cetans themselves are as real to me as Mam Gaia and her human children on this side of the sky.

It rains gasoline on Tau Ceti II. The Cetans need to keep themselves from drying out but they can’t go back into the ocean without breaking up into the couple of hundred plastic-sheet things that are their ocean phase, so they build pools and channels to catch the rain so they can bathe in it most of the time. That’s the first thing they ever built, they say, the way that huts to keep the rain off were the first thing humans ever built, and before then they lived in hollow places where the rain gathers the way we once lived in caves. When I was reading the briefing paper, both times, I stopped at the bit where it talked about that, and just stared at the words for a long moment. It’s a funny thing, that something that reminds me just how different we are from the Cetans makes me think of them as people like us.

We went from caves to huts to Troy Tower and Star’s Reach. They went from hollows in the rock to pools and channels to—what? We don’t know. The people here at Star’s Reach two hundred years ago didn’t know, though they’d seen something in one of the messages from Tau Ceti II that made them think the Cetans built something or other on a big scale. They certainly know how to build and power a radio as big as the one here at Star’s Reach, which is no small job. It’s occurred to me now and again that they may be smarter than we are, enough smarter to have missed making the mistakes that sent the old world to its end. Mind you, it’s also occurred to me now and again that they may be sitting in their pools of gasoline and wondering if we’re smarter than they are, and missed some troubled time in their history that we probably can’t even imagine. It’s the kind of thing that I used to wonder about when I was younger, and used to stare up at the stars and think about what might be out there; it’s almost frightening that now we’re starting to find out.