Two: The Dead Man's Letter

I hung there in the darkness of the underplace for what seemed like a long time and tried to think of some way to save my life. The doorway was out of reach, and trying to haul myself up to it brought down more pieces of crumbling concrete; no escape that way. Shouting for help was an obvious waste of time, since there was nobody closer than Berry up above, and trying to wrestle my backup lamp out of the bottom of the bag on my hip wouldn’t give me anything but a better look at what was going to get me reborn, and might well make me lose my grip and fall. So I clung to the rebar, mind racing, while the scents of dust and lightning rose up from underneath me.

It must have been less than a minute, though it felt like an hour, before I thought of the tangle of wire in my pocket. The thought of letting go of the pieces of rebar that held me up was not exactly comforting, but no other plan came to mind, so I tightened my right hand on the longer piece of rebar, reached down with the other, pulled the wire from the pocket of my coat and threw it toward where I thought I remembered the floor had been completely bare, then caught the rebar again before my right hand could slip.

Lightning flared again, and went still. After a moment a dull red glow and a hot-metal smell began to fill the room: the wire, heating up to incandescence from the current flowing through it. The light, dim as it was, gave me a gift I hadn’t expected: I could see, below me and a little to one side, a big piece of concrete that had landed flat on the floor. I gauged the distance, swung myself over that way and dropped.

A moment falling through near-darkness, and then my feet hit; I breathed out all at once and landed as soft as I could. The concrete shifted beneath my feet, but I kept my balance, and once the dust settled I was able to dig through the bag on my belt and pull out the little electric lamp I kept there. Ruinmen always carry an extra way of making a light, and this was why; the lamp’s pale light blended with the glow from the copper wire fading out halfway across the room to give me a good look at the place that had almost killed me.

It was much bigger than the closet above it, the walls rough, as though the concrete had been poured in a hurry. An iron ladder went down one wall from the broken ceiling to within a few feet of the floor, showing where a hatch must have been sealed up sometime after the shelter was built. There would be another entrance somewhere, but finding that could wait. Over to one side, a metal door led out of the room, and a tiny red light glowed next to the door, the only warning the ancients gave of the death they’d woven into the floor. There would be a switch on the other side of the door that would turn off the current, if I could reach it.

I crouched, held the lamp close to the floor and made out the pattern of conductive strips on it. I’d crossed a floor of the same kind before more than once barefoot, with Mister Garman watching, and the charge on the plates drained until a false step would bring a painful shock in place of sudden death. I’d never tried to cross such a floor in a ruin no one had cleared yet, and I was far from sure the copper wire had discharged everything the trap had to offer. Still, unless I wanted to wait until someone came looking for me, I had few other choices. After a moment, I stood up, pointed the lamp at the floor, and started toward the door.

To this day I don’t know if I did the thing right, or if the charge was simply low enough by then that my boots offered me protection enough against it. One way or another, I reached the door, and found it unlocked. I had to lean against it to force it open; hinges that had been still for more than six lifetimes screeched their complaint and moved. I reached through, fumbled for the switch on the other side, flipped it. The little light next to the door went green, and something hard and cold as old metal unknotted in me.

Murmur of sound from above caught my attention. After a moment, it turned into the drumming of feet. A familiar voice boomed: “Trey?”

“Down here, Mister,” I shouted back up. “Floor in the closet gave way, but I’m fine.”

“How far down?”

I glanced up. “About four meedas. There’s at least one more room down here.”

“Good.” Then, muffled: “Con, Berry, get me that rope. Two more lamps, too.”

It was Gray Garman, of course. It didn’t occur to me until then that the crash of the closet floor must have echoed through the old ruin, and told anyone above that something had gone wrong so they could go running for help. I was glad of that, for the thought of finding a way up out of the hidden room had begun to weigh on me.

A moment later a rope came snaking down from above and Garman came down it hand over hand. Once he’d reached the floor, he glanced at me, at the green light, at the floor. “Room was trapped?”

“Good and proper,” I said. “Gave me a bit of trouble.”

“Well.” He was looking at me then with his frown. “It’s not prentice work to get past one of those. Give me your pry bar.”

I stared at him blankly for a moment and then handed him the tool from my belt. He hefted it, then with a flick of his wrist caught me with the sharp edge on the bent end just below one cheekbone, hard enough to draw blood. I managed not to flinch. Then he was holding the bar out to me, saying, “Take it, ruinman.”

I took it, dazed, while the prentices whooped—three of them had followed Garman down the rope, and a fourth on the way. “Well, Mister Trey,” Garman said then with a faint smile at the formal courtesy, “did you check out the room back there?” A motion of his head pointed at the door behind me and the room beyond.

“Didn’t have a chance, Mister Garman. I was heading that way when you showed up.”

“Let’s see what they left for us,” he said, and motioned for me to take the lead.

By then my mind had started to grapple with what had just happened. Going from prentice to ruinman, said the guild rules, took some proof of skill that none of the misters could quarrel with; some prentices did it by plain hard work, and some by a chance find they followed up the right way, but you could also do it by landing yourself in deep trouble in the ruins and getting out alive. The thought dazzled me; after close on eleven years as Garman’s prentice, I was a mister and a ruinman myself, and I was about to be first through a door that, beyond the last shadow of a doubt, nobody had opened since the old world reached its end.

I shouldered the door the rest of the way open and raised my lamp. Garman and the others pressed close behind me. The light showed a metal frame that once held two beds, one atop the other, against the wall to the right; shreds of a curtain failed to hide the toilet next to it; shelves along the far wall would have held food and water once, and there were two long things, guns almost certainly; over to the left, not quite against the wall, was a table with dusty shapes on it I did not recognize at first.

I was most of the way to the table before I realized we were not alone in the room. Still, the one who sat at the table, head and shoulders slumped forward onto it, was long past greeting us. Pale bone showed through what was left of the stiff heavy clothing the old world put on its soldiers. I stared at him for a long moment, then made the blessing sign, even though it had been long enough even his ghost must have been dead by then. A sheet of cracked and yellowed paper lay beneath the bleached bones of one hand. Near him on the table was a blocky shape with dials and buttons that might, I guessed, have been a radio.

I glanced around the room again. The last weeks or months of the man’s life were written in the room plainly enough. He fled here in the twilight of the old world, hiding from one or another of the dangers of that terrible time, and sat by the radio day by day while the food and water dwindled, waiting for some message that came too late if it came at all. There must have been thousands of stories like that, for ruinmen find such things often enough.

“Well,” said Garman. He’d already examined the guns, and went to the radio. “The guns are in fine condition. This—” He motioned toward the box on the table. “—won’t work any more, but we’ll get plenty for it. Conn?”

Conn was his senior prentice now, and had been searching the shelves. “A couple of small machines—I’m not sure what they are—and bullets for the guns.”

“Good. I know gunsmiths who’d sell their eyeballs to get those. Now let’s see what this has to say—” He moved the bones of the dead man’s hand away from the yellow paper, and I raised the lamp as the others crowded around. This is what it said.


TOP SECRET/STAR’S REACH
PAGE 01 OF 01 R 111630Z NOV 34
FM: GEN BURKERT DRCETI
TO: CETI PROJECT STAFF ORNL
1. (TS/SR) PROJ DIR LUKACS REPORTS EVAC COMPLETE FROM NRAO AND LANGLEY. ALL RECORDS AND STAFF SAFE. WRTF OPERATIONAL AND CETI INCOMING.
2. (TS/SR) POTUS/DNS/DCI ADVISED THAT PROJECT ONGOING DESPITE CRISIS.
3. (TS/SR) TRANSPORT FOR ORNL PROJECT STAFF TO WRTF TO FOLLOW ASAP. INSTRUCTIONS VIA FEMA/GWEN WHEN SITUATION PERMITS.
CLASS BURKERT DRCETI RSN 1.5E X4
TOP SECRET/SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED

We all looked up from the paper and at each other. “Mother of Life,” said Garman. “Well.” He said no more, nor needed to. The words hung in the dry air. I can still hear them in my mind, wrapped up in the stillness of that place of beginnings and endings.

Most of five years passed before I clambered down a gray weathered stair and saw the promise of those words become a reality. The others—Thu, Tashel Ban, Berry, Eleen, and old Anna, for whom all this is the closing of a circle and not the opening of a door—followed me into the place where, if the stories are true, the old world’s last and greatest secret lies waiting.

As I write these words, we have settled for the night in what must once have been living quarters two levels below the surface. The rooms are bare and windowless, but we have ample room for the supplies we brought here. One lantern burns bright in the room where I sit; we have turned off the others to save fuel. Eleen sleeps with her head in my lap, curled like one of the foxes she claims as kinfolk, brown hair fallen all anyhow under my hand. The others are asleep as well, except for Thu, who never sleeps. We dodged a sorry death earlier today, and we all know there may be plenty of other chances to die before we find what we came for, but even so it is a grand thing to have finally come to Star’s Reach.

(To be continued...)